Forever Expanding Awareness In Liberation

Last night I watched an excellent movie. I highly recommend seeing it. Here’s a review on the movie that gives a little insight into what it’s about.
The movie is called “Waking Life” by Richard Linklater.

If this year’s Dramatic Competition lineup was the strongest in years (luckily for me, as I served on the Dramatic Competition Jury), it was also the weakest for premieres. Richard Linklater’s much-anticipated digital animation film Waking Life stood out by a mile. But then, it would be a standout in any year.

It’s at once a great leap forward for Linklater, and a partial revisiting of Slacker, his ten-year-old magnum opus, yoking together idiosyncratic indie material and a cutting-edge digital process rendered with a human touch. Linklater’s film is a cartoon like no other: the director shot a live-action film on digital video, completed his fine cut and then had a team of 31 artists animate every frame with new software designed by his principal collaborator, animation director Bob Sabiston.

Like Slacker, Waking Life is set in Austin, Linklater’s home base, and consists of an episodic series of some 40 encounters with a variety of characters, most of whom impart something of their vision of life, the world, and What It All Means to the film’s protagonist, a twentysomething kid played by Dazed and Confused’s Wiley Wiggins. Drifting from one encounter to the next, Wiggins is the passive party to a variety of monologues, rants, ruminations, lectures, and overheard conversations, only occasionally engaging in a dialogue with anyone.

If there was nothing thematic to unify Slacker’s procession of characters other than its conceit of glimpsing a succession of self-contained personal realities, Waking Life is structured around a playful, beguiling dream narrative. The whole film is a continuous dream that takes on increasingly melancholy overtones and intimations of mortality as it unfolds. On the face of things, it’s Wiggins’ character’s dream because it’s his progress that we’re following. Though he’s primarily a physical presence, moving from encounter to encounter on foot, there are a number of passages in which his disembodied point of view floats up and away to gaze down at the city below, before descending to flit invisibly from one character to another. This stream-of-unconsciousness is periodically interrupted — or jarred — by a series of false awakenings, opening up the unnerving prospect of an endless recession of dreams within more dreams that Linklater never resolves. Is Wiggins the dreamer or part of the dream? There are several potential beginnings — is it when we see Wiggins fall asleep in his house? Is it earlier, when he’s hit by a car as he studies a cryptic message in the middle of the road? Maybe it’s earlier still, when we see him asleep on the train bringing him to Austin? Most likely, it’s when the young boy in the opening scene falls asleep — and if so, then isn’t Wiggins merely the boy’s dream of himself as a young man? Potheads are going to love this film.

Within this brilliantly sustained dream framework, Linklater assembles an extraordinary array of voices and outlooks. There’s something here for everyone: from existentialism to Zen, from paranoid nihilism to quantum physics, from linguistic theory to Bazin’s Christian ontology of cinema, expounded by cult indic filmmaker Caveh Zahedi in one of many memorable vignettes. Without getting pretentious, Waking Life operates according to genuinely dialectical principles, effortlessly containing within itself opposing, contradictory, and mutually exclusive philosophies and worldviews.

Demonstrating a great ear for speech and language, and an uncanny knack for when to come in and when to cut out of a given setpiece or riff, Linklater orchestrates the whole thing beautifully — and orchestration is one of the film’s central metaphors: an early scene drops in on a six-piece orchestra in delighted mid-rehearsal, and the music they’re rehearsing is the score of the film you’re already watching. He and Sabiston have also achieved a remarkable feat with the animation, which maintains visual consistency while resisting homogenization. Its clean, minimal look is supple, expressive, and as alive with the nuances of each individual animator’s style and sensibility as it is responsive to the unique characteristics of each actor. In this light, it’s hard to say what’s most moving and triumphant about Waking Life: its inclusive celebration of idiosyncratic sensibility and the authenticity of the personal voice (”Let my own lack of a voice be heard,” one character proclaims); or its abiding sense of life as a dream without end, filled with yearning for connection and meaning that forever floats just out of reach, encompassing everything from the banal to the cosmic.

Gavin Smith is FILM COMMENT’s editor.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Film Society of Lincoln Center