The Sins of Freck
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Few recent movies have disappointed me more than A Scanner Darkly. It wasn’t bad, but for the first-ever completely faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel it failed spectacularly to capture what’s compelling about his work. Dick’s novels are deeply unsettling — they leave the reader so disoriented that, two-thirds of the way in, you’re no longer sure of whether or not the characters even exist. Dick’s Scanner pulls the floor out from under you, leaving you as unsure of the protagonist’s identity as he is; Linklater, on the other hand, was content to let Keanu Reeves talk about how drugs are totally weird without ever showing it.
Half of the problem with the movie was that it hewed too closely to the source material. There was one scene, however, that was taken whole cloth from Dick’s prose and yet works perfectly. Better yet — it’s hilarious.
