Waking Life


Starring Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Peter Atherton, John Christenson, Timothy Levitch, Adam Goldberg, Louis Mackey, Steven Prince, Charles Gunning, Nicky Katt, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh. Co-written and Directed by Richard Linklater.

Wiley (Wiggins) arrives at the bus station, sees a very pretty girl, makes a phone call, and then hops into a sailboat car. He is driven to a side street, let out and promptly run over. But he's quite fine - and he precedes to meander from conversation to conversation with various characters he meets, and they discuss philosophy, dreams and the meaning of life.

Soon he realizes he's in a dream himself. But every time he seems to awake, he meets another character and realizes he hasn't woken up - he's still dreaming.

Very original and often hypnotic this film features "rotoscoping" animation that takes live-action digital footage of the actors and surroundings, and animates cartoon-like versions of the footage. Each character is handled by a different artist, so the film has a wild, dreamlike quality. Sometimes the animation is difficult to watch, with the loud colours and swirling lines of the characters. Sometimes it's next to impossible to watch, such as the extremely choppy sequences where Wiley is flying over houses in his subdivision. But a lot of the time, the swirling, curvy lines of the animation feels almost life-like, and you can almost see the real person behind the cartoon images.

The film adopts a free-style narrative, jumping from character to character, scene to scene without evidence of a story or plot. But then, in a dream, events and scenes occur almost randomly as they flit through the mind. Like My Dinner With Andre, the film features little action and lots of talk about a wide variety of ideas. While in danger of being pretentious, it rarely is, thanks to a sense of wonder and sense of humour throughout. There are boring moments, but the film moves through a wide range of characters and very soon an interesting character comes along to make us laugh and offer interesting thoughts on death, the meaning of dreams, our tendency to be "ants" performing their tasks with little reflection or sense of joy, and a wide variety of other topics.

Linklater uses a lot of characters and has brought back many performers from his past films. Wiggins, from Dazed and Confused, nicely personifies the slightly stupified dreamer not always able to make heads or tails of the events going on around them. Hawke and Delpy reprise their roles from Before Sunrise and are visibly having fun letting loose, discussing how dreams seem to take forever, yet when one awakes very little time has elapsed. Perhaps the most fun character is a loopy free-spirit played by Timothy Levitch.

Waking Life is literally an art film, where hallucinatory images highlight the expression of sometimes deep, often chaotic discussions of philosophy. Often the characters spoke so fast, that I missed many of the ideas and thoughts, and had next to no time to let the ones I caught sink in before the next one arrived. It will not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you desire something different and quite unique, Waking Life is worth floating into.




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