Review of Waking Life (2001) by Kenneth L — 09 Mar 2015

I'm not sure why it took me 14 years to see this movie, but I'm glad I finally got around to it. Richard Linklater is such a consistently fascinating filmmaker; he keeps exploring complex philosophical territory in the most down-to-earth ways. The Before trilogy provides a fascinating reflection on time and relationships; though I haven't seen it yet, presumably his latest film Boyhood also does interesting things with time and the nature of human experience. Even his more mainstream films, like School of Rock, Bernie, and Me & Orson Welles, are all unique and quite enjoyable. The film, from 2001, is perhaps his most obviously intellectualized; I can't think of many other films that feature prolonged discussions of Andre Bazin or say the word "ontology" so casually.

Some people will find the movie frustrating; certainly it resembles few other films, either in style or content. The film's technique is the most immediately obvious distinguishing feature; it was created with an animated technique known as "rotoscoping," in which the filmmaker first shoots live-action footage and animators later paint over it, either physically or digitally (in this case, digitally). The animation has a deliberately unstable, woozy feeling: characters' eyes seem to float off of their head and back, backgrounds shift around as if everything were at sea, and surreal little doodles appear and disappear without warning. The whole thing is meant to evoke the atmosphere of a dream, which is appropriate given that so much of the movie is explicitly about dreaming and might actually be taking place in a dream. As far as the "story," such as it is, we get a nameless protagonist wandering around talking to an endless stream of people who all have intense and intricate thoughts on various philosophical and theoretical matters. A few of the characters are recognizable - Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy appear, possibly as alternate-universe versions of their Before Sunrise characters, and Linklater himself is in the film's penultimate scene. Mostly, though, the characters seem to be played by non-actors, and I suspect a few people are more or less playing themselves. The characters talk and talk about different matters, and the film never tries to tie it all together into a plot or coherent overall argument; instead, like a dream, it just sort of drifts from one thing to the next. It's the sort of movie you would need to watch a couple of times to really get to the bottom of; but after one viewing, I can definitely say that I enjoyed it, and found it to be possibly the most distinctive of all of Linklater's films (at least, out of the ones I've seen so far).