Early in this film, we meet an unnamed young man in an unnamed city. It might be New York, or Austin, Texas, or maybe nowhere. The young man gets into a car shaped like a motorboat, driven by a guy wearing a captain’s hat. Thus begins the literal and figurative voyage of surreal self-discovery that is Waking Life, an astonishingly imaginative wonder of a film from writer-director Richard Linklater. “Are we sleepwalking through our waking state,” the film asks, “or wakewalking through our dreams?”
In a lot of ways, it’s reminiscent of Slacker, Linklater’s 1991 survey of Gen-X anomie in Austin. It has the same sort of casual, naturalistic dialogue and documentary feel, and it bounces from character to character in a way that seems to defy continuity. But it’s the look of this film that marks it as a giant leap forward in both creativity and originality.
Using an innovative digital rotoscoping technique developed by art director Bob Sabiston, a variety of animators superimpose their stylistic interpretations over Linklater’s live-action reference footage. The resulting images are like paintings come to life. Full of vivid colour and expression, they shape a world where everything and nothing is familiar, and anything is possible. Eyeballs bulge impossibly wide; people dissolve into amorphous shapes; two people discussing André Bazin and the “holy moment” suddenly become human-shaped clouds.
Watching this film is as simultaneously exhilarating and disconcerting as dreaming itself; it’s a free-form fantasy, an ephemeral lucid dream of flight that we experience along with the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins, who, like much of the cast, has appeared in other Linklater films). His journey is a series of interludes that occur with channel-surfing randomness—monologues and conversations about free will and determinism, thought and action, introspection and intimacy. Think My Dinner with André on hallucinogens. (Louis Malle is another of the many filmmakers, visionaries and existentialists name-checked throughout the film.)
Some of these vignettes work better than others. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, reprising their roles in Before Sunrise, share some pillow talk about the collective mind that recalls some of Slacker‘s more empty-headed pop philosophy, and Wiggins’ encounter with The Cruise‘s “Speed” Levitch would be surreal even without the animation. Then again, maybe that’s the point; the dreams we remember are the freaky ones we never quite understand.
Juxtaposed with hopeful reveries about intellectual perfectibility are dreams of a different nature. In one memorable scene, two gun nuts in a bar blow each other away while a Chopin nocturne plays softly in the background. Nightmares, too, have a place in Waking Life. (One character opines that people like Plato and Aristotle are more superior to the rest of us than we are to chimpanzees.)
If that seems timely right now, it’s only because the film’s message is such a universal one. Waking Life isn’t just a challenging movie that awakens us from the slumber of expectation; it’s a beautiful and impassioned plea for all of us to wake up, open our eyes and embrace each other as human beings. We can only hope it isn’t a pipe dream.
(4/4)