Waking Life

Richard Linklater's Slacker charted out life on the margins, but this animated essay on dreams and reality ventures right off the map. Xan Brooks takes a trip through an exasperating, extraordinary picture

"The ongoing wow is happening right now," says a character in Waking Life, a cinematic Russian doll of dreams within dreams, in which each case pops up to reveal another layer of mystery. In his 1991 debut, Slacker, Richard Linklater memorably charted US life on the margins. With this exasperating, extraordinary picture he appears to have slipped off the map entirely.

  1. Waking Life
  2. Production year: 2001
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 100 mins
  6. Directors: Richard Linklater
  7. Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Prince
  8. More on this film

Appropriately, given the movie's tiered nature, the writer-director describes Waking Life as "two films in one, a double creative collaboration". Linklater shot and edited the film at speed, using digital cameras and a skeleton crew. The final cut was then turned over to Bob Sabiston's team of animators, who painted over every second of footage. Each minute of screen time is the result of an estimated 250 hours of animation.

Thankfully, the effort pays off. Sabiston's style complements perfectly the woozy preoccupations of Linklater's script, a scrapbook meditation on dreams and reality that bobs its sleep-walking protagonist (Wiley Wiggins) between coffee-shop philosophers in an unnamed city that sometimes resembles New York, sometimes Austin, Texas. Backgrounds are rendered in dancing watercolours; the ensemble cast come as pop-art approximations. Their facial movements are familiar, warm and expressive. But their eyes, represented by unreadable blobs of colour, give nothing away.

Halfway through, Linklater's ongoing wow threatens to broaden into a yawn. But just as the ceaseless chatter about existentialism, reincarnation and the making of the perfect movie starts to pall, Waking Life shifts gear and turns subtly darker in tone. By the end, this daydream nation is teetering on the verge of a nightmare. One key indicator of the dream state, a man tells Wiggins, is an inability to adjust light levels: "If the lights are on and you can't turn them off, then most likely you're dreaming." On leaving the room, Wiggins flicks the switch himself, just to make sure.

Reeling out of the cinema as the closing credits rolled, I was tempted to do the same. Waking Life has that power. It nudges you infinitesimally towards a parallel state that is like, and yet not like, at once banal and bewitching. It casts a creeping, narcotic spell.

At the Odeon West End, London WC2 (020-7928 3232) on November 16 and 17.

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