Waking Life

Hey, college students! Tired of paying attention to boring, incoherent lectures from your professors just so you can do okay on the test? Looking to take a break from such speechifying at the movie theater, which normally provides an escape almost as reliable as alcohol? If that's the case, stay the hell away from writer/director Richard Linklater's new film, "Waking Life."

Linklater's previous films include "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," so you'd think he would show some mercy to us undermotivated souls. Instead, Linklater jettisons traditional plot and visuals completely to explore the weird boundary between dreams and life. This leaves us, the audience, floating free in a sea of impressionistically animated characters. And what do these characters, the expressions of the farthest reaches of some characters's fantastic imagination, do? They give lectures. Lecture after lecture after lecture. It's enough to drive you back to drink.

You may think that I am exaggerating for effect, but unfortunately I am not. How would you like to hear the following sentence on your next trip to the movies: "The ontology of film has to do with what the ontology of plot has to do with, except it adds an element of time." It sounds awkward even on the page, uses overly highfalutin' vocabulary, and means almost nothing. Or this one: "When we communicate with one another and we feel that we have connected and we think we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion." This lecture continues in the same tautological vein for what seems like an hour, and the lecturer's expressionless voice drains her spiel of even humorous effect.

"Waking Life" devotes itself, for most of its running time, to presenting similar thoughts on existentialism, free will, collective consciousness, the nature of evolution, and other such subjects that one normally runs to the cinema to escape. Linklater treats these subjects in the most basic and predictable manner possible - many freshman-dorm bull sessions feature livelier insights onto the nature of existence. And the sentences quoted above are all too representative of the style and substance of the script. It's hard to imagine how Linklater thought anyone could sit through it all.

Admittedly, Linklater is not trying to "entertain" as such in this film. The lectures eventually hook into the rudiments of a dilemma: the unnamed main character (Wiley Wiggins) has found himself in a kind of halflife of the soul, where the world around him is somehow familiar and yet utterly permeable at the same time. He likes it, and for some reason finds the lectures fascinating, but at the same time he wants out at some point.

The animation is the best expression of this dilemma; Linklater actually shot and edited the whole film on consumer-level cameras, then turned it over to animation master Bob Sabiston and his staff, who turned it into something halfway resembling art. The effects Sabiston and crew create, such as wavering tables, swelling and collapsing heads, and eyes that sometimes resist coming into focus, subtly create an atmosphere charged with both fantasy and unease. A lot of labor went into making this film cool and provocative to look at.

But was the labor worth it for this film? "Waking Life" takes on a bit more urgency and import as it talks its way to a conclusion, but unless you are possessed of uncommon patience and a Herculean tolerance for intellectual self-gratification, you'll have given up on the film long before.

Perhaps you'll throw up your hands at the endless name-dropping ("It's like what D.H. Lawrence said...", "Kirkegaard's last words were...", "...an interesting conversation with Albert Schweitzer"). Maybe you'll realize that even the most vibrant animation cannot allay the tedium of watching one guy talk for five minutes about quantum mechanics and free will and say nothing you didn't know before entering the theater. Or you may retch at the endless platitudes which Linklater presents as if they are exciting new discoveries: "Your life is yours to create," "To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence," "Dream is destiny."

Linklater once studied philosophy in college, and he apparently liked his studies so much he thought he would share with the rest of us. "Waking Life" proves, unfortunately, that as a professor he's even worse than the guy who inspired you to take a trip to the movies in the first place.

Some people I respect (not movie critics!) enjoyed this film. I may have done too much philosophical pondering in my life to enjoy Linklater's; for me, it was mostly a rehash of thoughts I've already thought, and no amount of visual invention could possibly disguise that. As I exited the press screening and the critics were debating the merits of what they'd just seen, I couldn't resist saying, "I'm in college! I don't need to see that!" The fact that they just looked at me funny doesn't take awat from the fact that, for me, this was the least enjoyable movie of 2001.

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