Common Sense Note
Parents should know this animated science fiction film includes frequent discussions of drugs, both real (cocaine) and not (something called Substance D). Addicts, dealers, and cops lie to each other and lament their loss of trust and community. Characters also drink and smoke cigarettes. A sex scene shows a woman's naked body (including exposed breasts) during the act, which is fairly explicit. There is rough language and some gritty images, incuding a drug addict imagining himself being shot in the head, and another throwing up while being admitted to an alleged rehab center.
Families can talk about the animated style here. Why was it made this way? What does it do to the viewer's relationship with the characters? Does it add to the futuristic feel? Families may also want to talk about some of the common themes in science fiction -- the constant tracking of civilians, for example. How does this movie compare to other sci fi? Finally, families may want to discuss the addicts. Are they truly friends? Is anybody ultimately sympathetic?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
A SCANNER DARKLY's unique animation is striking, and the conspiracy that begins to unravel -- through a disintegrating drug addicts perspective -- is equally seductive. Mature viewers may not always understand what is happening on screen, but they will be compelled none the less.
Set in this animated near future ("seven years from now"), and based on a 1977 Philip K. Dick science fiction novel, the plot concerns undercover narcotics agent Fred (Keanu Reeves), who is also a dealer named Bob.
Bob is supposed to uncover some dealing kingpin, who may be himself. To keep his cover, he's been using, and now he's hooked on a fictional futuristic drug called Substance D.
He lives in a house with wacky friends and addicts, Barris (a very memorable Robert Downey Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson). Their paranoid, bizarre interactions provide plenty of laughs -- such as Barris trying to fashion a homemade gun silencer (he fails) -- but also leave viewers knowing they are doomed.
One of the film's most compelling inventions is the "scramble suit," which serves partly as undercover device for Bob and his co-workers, partly as means to evade responsibility and seek revelation, and partly as metaphors for lost identities. The characters who wear them look like everyone and no one, their outward appearances shifting millions of times per minute.
Richard Linklater's movie makes consummate use of the suit as concept, via the rotoscoping technique the director first explored in Waking Life. The application of weird-and-shifty animation onto live-action performances makes the very notion of material, lived-in space seem rather quaint.
To the extent that Scanner adopts any conventional form, it establishes Bob as the most sympathetic of the addicts. Examined by doctors, Bob learns that his use of D is having its inevitable effect, severing the hemispheres in his brain, such that he's can no longer keep track of his multiple lives, forgetting where he is and what he's doing.
Primary among Bob's confusions is his relationship with his girl, also his dealer, Donna (Winona Ryder). Like other women characters imagined by Philip Dick, Donna is more baffling and remote than dependable, but she also pulses with a sense of grim knowledge. Another lens through which to view Bob's disintegration, Donna is sometimes sad, sometimes elusive.
Bob's junkie story is both banal and bizarre. Simultaneously strange and familiar, not himself, he lives inside an ooky, unsolvable world that mirrors our own ongoing fears, of surveillance, loss, and forgetting.
Families who enjoy this movie might also want to see Linklater's Dazed and Confused and Waking Life, as well as Reeves' iconic turn in the heady science fiction film, The Matrix.
Rate It!
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Sexual Content(All animated): Breasts visible, sexual activity explicit and brief; young men discuss sex with a woman. |
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ViolenceAddict imagines bug attack, then a shooting in the head (brief, brutal image); various falls and threats made by paranoid drug users; the central drug is said to destroy brains. |
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LanguageFrequent language: multiple f-words (over 30); slightly fewer s-words; some creative permutations of obscenities ("freckle-d---"). |
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Social BehaviorDrug users and dealers, undercover cops (narcs) and organization/city officials all lie to betray one another. Police are brutal. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoFrequent cigarette smoking; "drug epidemic" drives the plot (the drug severs brain hemispheres); characters sell and purchase drugs, smoke cigarettes (cigarette butts fill several ashtrays), drink liquor, discuss and name drugs (cocaine, for example). |
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