Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
I initially approached Richard Linklater's 2001 effort Waking Life with a mixture of eagerness and cautiousness; the story (such as there is of it) concerns a young man caught in a dream filled with philosophical discussion, animated monologues and the kind of strange visual effects that only rotoscoping can achieve. What concerned me, on the other hand, are my lifelong troubles with dreams and sleeping. Until the age of about seven, I cannot recall having any kind of dreams but nightmares, and to this day, have difficulties perceiving dreams and waking from one another. And since Waking Life's wandering digressions frequently delve into the phenomena of lucid dreaming and eventually, the horror of being unable to leave a dream, I was a little nervous.
Fortunately, the film moved in different direction than I was expecting. As a director, Linklater seems to know his strengths, unique as they are. True to form, Waking Life mostly eschews narrative storytelling in favor of recurring episodes (although less so than it initially appears) and brings in a familiar cadre of ringers to liven up the monologues that are the backbone of the movie. Like any good auteur, Linklater seems to have his favorite casting well that he returns to again and again; Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy appear in their romantic jouster modes from Before Sunrise, Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt as theory-obsessed revolutionaries and even the unnamed protagonist, Wiley Wiggins, was a primary character in Dazed and Confused. In particular, Wiggins does a commendably fine job at the most difficult of characters, the passive observer; his lack of expression and vague sense of befuddlement display the kind of slowly unnerving sense of dread a truly inescapable dream can have. The familiar faces do lend a certain dependability to the dreamscape, particularly as it's so constantly in a state of flux.
And that's another of the strengths of Waking Life. Although we're anchored to a perspective by the familiarity of the cast and by recurring themes in the monologues (and sometimes dialogues), the film does truly feel a dream. Not in the absurdly fanciful landscapes of color and whimsy that sometimes passes for dreamlike, but in the ever-shifting, just-not-quite right concreteness of most of my own dreams. Linklater and company use the color palette-stretching abilities of rotoscope to fine effect, sometimes barely highlighting the shading the actors, sometimes stretching them to nearly cartoonish effects. Some of the drier monologues even become presentations of a kind, the speakers and their surroundings twisting and emphasizing the points being made.
But that's one of the more off-and-on parts of the film; many of the arguments made are interesting and well presented, but enough arrive half-baked or simply sophomoric enough to detract. The most constant themes seemed to be determinism and the nature of evolution, with enough digressions into the nature of lucid dreaming, Philip K. Dick and collective memory to fill a coffeehouse. But these discussions are worst when they're presented as talking heads drifting into didactism; they're at their best when they become part of a story, or at the very least have the kind of dream logic behind that a man driving a car-boat does. You'd kind of have to see it to get that part.
Waking Life is consistently at its finest when it does focus on the arguments it's trying to make, and instead slowly emphasizing how the unconscious mind can be trying to articulate what the waking world can't force itself to confront. I can't say it truly unnerved me more than any of my dreaming issues already did, but it certainly was interesting to see an aspect of my life played out so accurately on film. Even moments after watching it, I am already beginning to have to reconsider what all these characters were actually trying to tell me.
by Nathan Kamal
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