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Waking Life
****
Cinema Releases - May 10, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
100 minutes. Written and directed by Richard Linklater. An animated film
with the voices of Wiley Wiggins, Trevor Jack Brooks, Robert C. Solomon,
Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Charles Gunning, David Sosa, Alex Jones, Aklilu
Gebrewald, Carol Dawson, Lisa Moore, Steve Fitch, Steven Prince, Adam Goldberg,
Nicky Katt, David Martinez, Tiana Hux, Speed Levitch, Steven Soderbergh,
Richard Linklater.
There will be people who find "Waking
Life" pretentious. Such people are scared of not seeming omniscient
if they dare to surrender to anything with a whiff of longwindedness. Yes,
this movie features streams of consciousness and long passages of theorising
-- but isn't it a pleasure to see a film so willing to listen to ideas? This
is a picture with a curiosity about how people think and speak, one of
groundbreaking filmmaking techniques and otherworldly rhythm. Watching it
is liberating, dreamy, joyous.
It's an animated film featuring Wiley Wiggins
as a young guy wandering around Texas and hearing the musings of bar patrons,
professors, old friends and others. One of the guys Wiggins meets thinks
that evolution is on the brink of making us beings of pure emotion, another
weighs up the concept of free will, another wonders if telepathy makes all
discovered ideas drift unconsciously into the atmosphere, another is obsessed
with whether it is possible to make an impacting statement in an age where
everything seems to have been covered. Et cetera. There are more than fifty
speaking parts, voiced by actors such as Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Stephen
Soderbergh, Adam Goldberg and Linklater himself -- the movie spoils us with
company.
Before long we discover that Wiggins is in a dream
from which he cannot escape... every time he thinks he has woken up, he finds
that he runs into more curious thinkers, or cannot turn off light switches,
or is floating through air. The movie uses the dream state to ponder the
question of whether our perception of reality is really just a dream... it
also uses it as justification for its wandering structure. Linklater finds
pleasure in moving to different groups of characters, exploiting the free
form of animated fantasy and breaking down the structural and rhythmic barriers
that formula pictures create for themselves.
Many of the discussions in the movie are thought
provoking, others seem somewhat limited, some are just so much academic waffle
-- but all the talk is engaging. Linklater views people with interest and
tenderness; he helps us to absorb the enthusiasm of his characters and become
inspired by the rhythms of their sentences. Hundreds of times have I heard
the theory that all life may be taking place in one instant, but here it's
related with personal intonations, anecdotes and recollections... and it
made me start to listen, and smile.
The animation has the appearance of Japanese anime
in its colouring and general shape, but the effect is different. Linklater
shot a live-action version of the movie on videotape and then got a team
of cartoonists to digitally 'draw' over the footage. The result of the method
is not quite like anything I've seen before -- the images do not look
photographic, but movements and gestures have the ring of life about them.
There's soul and presence behind the drawings; it's beautiful,
hypnotic.
I'm a sucker for pictures that achieve the effect
of dreams, because they flow into consciousness and journey with imagination
in the most intimate possible manner. "Waking Life" makes us ponder the irony
of feeling like we're dreaming when we're actually just awake and watching
a movie, while never threatening to break its spell. And it is witty, romantic
and good-looking. It is the kind of experience for which movie lovers
yearn.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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