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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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