Overall Rating
  Awesome: 40.28%
Worth A Look: 17.36%
Average: 1.39%
Pretty Bad: 15.97%
Total Crap: 25%
7 reviews, 102 user ratings
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| Waking Life |
by MovieGeek
"Roger Ebert loves this movie. Roger sometimes goes a little crazy."
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When I first saw the trailer for Waking Life, I was completely taken by it and put the film down as a “must see.” Just the impressionistic look of the animation was enough to attract me—Claude Monet has long been my favorite artist and I once flew to Los Angeles just to see a travelling Van Gogh exhibit.Credit Richard Linklater for experimenting with “interpolated rotoscoping” in which live action footage goes through a digital process to render a 99 minute feature length animation that looks like Manet or Monet paintings sprung to life. Most of the colors are muted earth tones as well, giving the film a relaxing and laid back feel. This should be my kind of movie.
The film’s pace reminds us of Linklater’s debut feature film, Slacker, as the movie unfolds with similar oddball characters and neo philosophers. Initially mesmerized by the look and feel of Waking Life, my initial enthusiasm began to turn into utter boredom about 5 minutes into the film. Had Linklater submitted his experiment as an animated short, I’d be praising his creative effort. Instead, this film feels more like an overrated junk piece of deleted scenes from previous Linklater work flimsily held together by a one trick premise. Without the digital technology to change the film’s appearance, critics would be scratching their heads at the film’s lack of coherence and its ultimate meaninglessness.
Based on Linklater’s Dazed and Confused character Wiley Wiggins, the protagonist may be in a perpetual dream state or he may be dead. After an opening sequence where two young children play a paper folding fortune telling game (“Your dreams are your destiny”), Wiggins meanders through a myriad of characters and sketches who attempt to make sense out of Life—Existentialism, the nature of Love, Free Will, Reality vs. Illusion, etc. For a touch of variety, Linklater occasionally inserts a short sketch, the most memorable being a conversation between a bartender and a guns rights advocate that ends with predictable pools of red coloring.
Nothing really happens during Waking Life. We listen in on a series of talking heads who expound about Life in far less interesting ways than My Dinner with Andre. In essence, Linklater’s monotonous film journeys into verbal masturbation that leads no where.
If I want didactic lectures about the meaning of life from educated derelicts, I can head over to Arizona State University and hang in some of the local coffeehouses to hear this sort of gibberish from people who have virtually no life outside of their academic existence. Had Linklater seamlessly included a handful of such scenes interspersed with other scenes to move the plot along, it would have been much more tolerable. But what about 25+ talking heads spouting philosophy? I began to feel like Romeo shouting at Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech: “Thou talk'st of nothing.”
If I want impressionism, I’ll get more satisfaction from heading over to the art museum and gazing at the works of Monet. Those paintings have much more action that Linklater’s feature, and they are far more creative visually than the predictable animated symbols that he throws into the mix—like the changing icons of Eastern religions that form the lapel pin of one of the talking heads. That some justify this as high art is unbelievable—this film becomes another in a recent trend of MTV styled films that emphasize form over substance.
One of the core questions asked during the film is whether the basic nature of human beings is more controlled by Fear or Laziness. Linklater’s film clearly establishes that he is controlled far more by Laziness. Had he actually developed a coherent story and pieced together some of his philosophical ideas more in the lines of a Woody Allen script, his impressionistic palette would be much easier to accept. Besides, if you actually have excellent actors, why hide them with the digital technology?
My guess is that Linklater found out about this cool digital rotoscoping method and decided to play with it on some throw away material, much like some initial forays I once took with Photoshop. When I discovered how easy it was to render any picture like a neo-impressionistic Van Gogh using a special filter, I began to transform many of my ordinary photographs into “works of art.” I suspect that Linklater has done much the same with Waking Life. The naïve part of me would like to believe that it’s a noble experiment, but the cynical portion suspects that it’s a commercial rip off designed to confuse arthouse patrons into thinking that they are watching something profound. Throw in a clever Billy Wilder quote about how worthless movies about dreams are to throw off cynical critics, so they won’t beat you up.
The film didn't work for me, even though I often enjoy films with spiritual and intellectual ideas and love the French impressionists. Crap is still crap, no matter what its guise. It’ll take a lot before I’ll be manipulated into watching another Linklater project using this digital trickery. I’ll assume that he’s taking more rejected ideas and mundane acting performances and enhancing them with technology to hide their inherent ineptness.
On the other hand, should Woody Allen ever rotoscope Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Crimes and Misdemeanors into an impressionistic animated feature, I’d watch it in a heartbeat. In fact, I’d watch anything that Allen does because even Allen on his worst filming days is superior to Linklater on his best.Some hypothesize that Waking Life is Linklater’s dream state. If so, I am thankful that I don’t inhabit his nightmarish Hell because the 99 minutes of this film were tortuous.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4879&reviewer=276
originally posted: 11/13/01 05:16:09
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USA
17-Oct-2001 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
07-Mar-2002
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