‘Waking Life’

In this animated dream, even a pay phone looks beautiful on a shimmering, shifting landscape.   [R]

By: Elise Nakhnikian

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Timothy "Speed" Levitch gives his animated look at life in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.


   Watching Waking Life feels like staying up all night in a dorm, half high from lack of sleep, to watch a procession of bright, earnest students discuss the meaning of life.
   Whether you find it insufferable or intriguing will depend on whether your idea of fun includes pondering questions like the nature of time, the existence of a collective unconsciousness, and the extent to which we control our own fates.
   True to its anti-authoritarian soul, Waking Life breaks every rule in Screenwriting 101. Wiley Wiggins, the main character, is so passive he’s verging on catatonic. The whole story is Wiley’s dream — unless he’s dying, in which case it’s his final life review. Either way, it has a woozy disregard for internal logic. The script is a torrent of monologues, "all theory and no action," as one character notes. And the notions people spout fit Webster’s second definition of "sophomoric": they’re the kinds of things most people obsess about briefly in their youth and then forget about forever. It shouldn’t work, yet this self-intoxicated stew of ideas pulsates with life.
   In Slackers and Dazed and Confused, writer-director Richard Linklater explored his hometown of Austin, Texas. Waking Life features the same wide-open skies, relaxed pace and perpetually self-scrutinizing hipoisie. For Waking Life , Linklater once again cast fistfuls of local characters, this time recruiting University of Texas professors, public-access-TV personalities, filmmakers, writers and musicians. But while the earlier movies were fairly straightforward dramas, Waking Life looks and feels like a dream.

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Linklater first filmed the cast members acting out their parts…. The live-action segments were then converted into animation, each by a different artist.


   To achieve that effect, Linklater first filmed the cast members acting out their parts, which generally consisted of making a speech to Wiley or another character. The live-action segments were then converted into animation, each by a different artist. The result is a shimmering, shifting landscape where even a pay phone can look achingly beautiful. The animation also enlivens the endless talk, giving physical form to the speakers’ energy and ideas.
   A lot of the talk is about how to blur the line between sleeping and waking. Meanwhile, the filmmakers toy with conventional ideas about what a movie should show and what should remain part of its scaffolding. The Austin musicians who provide Waking Life’s soundtrack show up onscreen, at first to rehearse the score we’ve been listening to. Linklater makes a couple of appearances too, initially as Wiley’s fellow passenger in the boat taxi and again at the end of the movie, issuing directions that Wiley obediently follows.
   If Waking Life has a central point to make, it’s probably that every moment is holy, yet most people let life slide by unappreciated "either sleepwalking through their waking state or wake-walking through their dreams," as one of the characters puts it. That’s hardly a new thought, of course, but the filmmakers find novel ways to make it concrete, jolting us awake with apparitions like a boat that’s been converted into a taxi and a chimp that narrates a portentous soundtrack to a silent movie and then eats the script. Meanwhile Wiley, our guide to this off-kilter world, keeps coming unmoored, floating up and away without warning or trying without success to wake up.

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A lot of the talk is about how to blur the line between sleeping and waking.


   Not everything maintains that weightless elegance. Some segments are downright annoying, like the one where a tinny-voiced fountain of aphorisms (Austin oracle "Speed" Levitch) chirps things like: "The ongoing WOW is happening right now" and "We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoevksy novel starring…clowns!"
   Others are pretentious. One character, for instance, tells a bartender a story about having killed a man in self-defense. We’re drawn in by his quietly well-told narrative — and then repelled when the man and the bartender blow each other away, for no reason at all. That pointless bloodbath may have been intended to make a point about violence in the movies, since the storyteller is Steven Prince, the author of several books on that topic. But it falls flat even if you know who the speaker is, which almost nobody will.
   Still, a little coy self-consciousness is a price worth paying for the sight of a man driving a taxi through a deserted downtown, his face steadily reddening as he rants through a megaphone to the empty streets about resisting "this corporate slave state." As another character puts it: "The powers that be want us to be passive observers." This movie wants us to wake up.
Rated R. Contains profanity and some violent imagery.
Waking Life is playing at the Princeton Adult School’s Second Chance Cinema, Kresge Auditorium, Princeton University, Feb. 19, 7:30 p.m. Admission costs $6. For information, call (609) 683-1101.