A floating dream

SHAWN LEVY

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After nearly a century of narrative movies, it's still, amazingly, possible for the form to be born afresh.

Once in a very rare while, a film comes along that creates its own context, a picture so unique and wholly realized that it changes our idea of the limit and shape and possibility of the medium. The ideas in it needn't be utterly unprecedented -- they may have cropped up in experimental shorts or brief passages of other films -- but they're combined, mounted and executed in such a way as to constitute genuine invention. You leave movies like this -- "Wings of Desire," the original "Breathless," "GoodFellas," "Blade Runner," "81/2" -- floating, the insides of your head rearranged, nothing quite the same anymore.

"Waking Life" by writer-director Richard Linklater is one of these films. Not so much a story as a string of harmonized ideas, it drifts with purposeful dream-logic from scene to scene, setting to setting, argument to argument, rich character to rich character. It looks like nothing you've ever seen -- an effect achieved by layering digital animation over live-action photography and then tinkering, seemingly endlessly, with textures, backgrounds, perspectives, colors, shapes. It moves to a soulful tango score, the recording of which is at one point part of the quote-unquote story. And the film teems with visual and, especially, verbal ideas -- whole philosophies of life and love and being and beauty and reality. There is enough in here for an entire world.

The film concerns the progress through space-time (there's no other way to describe it) of a young, unnamed man (Wiley Wiggins, who played the central character in Linklater's "Dazed and Confused") who seems to be on a quest for knowledge. He attends lectures; he visits with deep-thinkers; he eavesdrops on conversations in bars and restaurants; he travels. Now and again, he finds himself in bed, roused from his visions and conversations and aware that they were all part of a dream. But soon enough something clues him in that he's still dreaming -- and the differences between dreaming and wakefulness, in both the physical and metaphysical senses of the words, come to dominate the film's conversations and monologues.

Along the way, he runs into -- or floats past -- characters from other Linklater films (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in their "Before Sunrise" guises), members of Linklater's stock company (Nicky Katt and Adam Goldberg), odd personages from Linklater's seminal and structurally similar "Slacker," and a few other faces from the indie film world including Steven Soderbergh, Speed Levitch and Steven Prince. The character floats above Austin, Texas, and the Brooklyn Bridge, through a jail cell, a convenience store, an empty church, a train yard. Finally, he meets the director himself, who's playing pinball and offering his interpretation of life, dreams, reality, the nature of existence.

It's overwhelming, mind-bending, absorbing, profound. An English physicist discusses the relative merits of religious, Newtonian and quantum theories of free will. An angry man in a car rails over a loudspeaker about corporate tyranny; a lovely girl glanced at in a railway station yearns for human connections; a renowned filmmaker warns that movies about ideas are commercial poison; a barfly tells a story about a shooting; a woman on cable-access TV instructs viewers in how to manipulate themselves through waking dreams.

Scene after scene you're pulled into a striking new idea, a gorgeous style of animation, a joke, a fancy, a detail of the setting, the music, the pace. You find yourself constantly wishing to stop, rewind and mull over some bit of talk or imagery, yet the onward thrust of the material is as beguiling for the viewer as it seems to be for the central character. You want to stop; you want to go on. It's darned close to life, but prettier and with lovely music.

Finally, the miracle of "Waking Life" is this: Not only does this film make you think, it makes you want to think. Few films -- few works of art of any stripe -- can claim that.

From www.oregonlive.com

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