Total Dick

There is a whole subgenre of movies based on Philip K. Dick novels, starting with Bladerunner. Most of them bear little resemblance to the original, or are very bad, or both. A Scanner Darkly is different. It is very faithful to the novel, which one of Dick's most heartfelt, autobiographical tales.

It is a story about Substance D, or Death, a reality-altering, paranoia-inducing, highly addictive drug. Bob Arctor, played by Keanu Reeves, is both a user and an undercover narc. As a narc, he wears a scramble suit, which changes his face and voice several times a second, so that no one, not even his bosses. In the end, he winds up investigating himself, so divorced from reality that he doesn't realize that he and Arctor are the same person.

The scramble suit works because the whole movie is rotoscoped: filmed and traced as a cartoon. This makes many scenes visually interesting. In other scenes, the tracing is so faithful, you might as well be looking at the originally filmed scene (at least on my smallish screen). It isn't just a gimmick, but I'm hard pressed to say why it is integral to the film. Possibly as a metaphor to the mediated nature of drugged reality? Anyway...

A lot of this movie is about Reeves and his druggy friends sitting around talking. Robert Downey Jr. plays an intense conspiracy theorist type with a touch of Hunter S. Thomson. Woody Harrelson plays a dumb doper. (Typecasting?) Wynona Rider plays Arctor's girlfriend, who can't stand sex and doesn't like being touched - too much coke. Their conversations are funny, stupid, pathetic and finally, heartbreaking.

Dick has said that the novel was inspired by his experience with drugs, and many of the situations are transcribed from life. The movie ends with a long list of people whose lives were damaged or ended by drugs. And Arctor doesn't exactly mean "Author", but is sounds like it.