Waking Life (2001)

Richard Linklater's Brilliant Animated MindTripper!!

Waking Life (2001) is a dazzling mess. There are probably more ideas generated in those 100 minutes than in all other movies currently playing around town combined, even if its over 10 years old. Richard Linklater's film is presented as one long hallucination by its nameless central character, an observer of conversations about existentialism, rebirth, free will, bereavement, warfare, technology, faith and, most of all, the nature of dreams themselves.

Like virtually any work that dares to ask big, unanswerable questions, Waking Life can be pretentious and even exhausting but you also get euphoria from its unquenchable curiosity about the world, like a skyfall.

As in Slacker (1991), Linklater's first film, there is virtually no conformist story, making it easy to lose yourself along the way. The imprecise rotoscoped animation only enhances the feeling of displacement but that's specifically the point. In other words, getting lost with Linklater is a lot more enlightening than being spoon-fed, hand-led and patronized by a lot of garden-variety filmmakers more concerned with filling the theater than filling your brain.

Brimming with references to Jean-Paul Sartre, D.H. Lawrence and countless others, Waking Life is at times encumbered by its assault of ideas; still, it stands in direct hostility to an entertainment culture where being "about nothing" is a insignia of respect.

Sure, it'd be nice if people in this movie occasionally just talked about baseball or the weather to balance things out. There's also no denying that some of the images in Waking Life are breathtaking but at length, many might feel that this is an agonizing exercise in hedonistic, snotty filmmaking, that will ignite arguments over its apparent intrinsic worth and, no doubt, be touted by some as a masterpiece.

Nonetheless, Waking Life sticks with you in a insightful way, its ideas buzzing through your mind like fireflies. And I was beginning to think the sheer possibility was but a dream.

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