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Movie Review : Waking Life (2001)


I'm one of these people who got over college. Don't get me wrong, it changed my life. It was, to me, like being reborn on another planet reserved to interesting people only. It's fun for a couple years, but past a certain point, college turns into this place where you go to avoid the reality that you're eventually going to pay bills and die. I dig the work of American director Richard Linklater in general, partly because they offer me a controlled collegiate experience. His movies are full of lively people who shoot the shit, ponder over the meaning of being alive and who seize the day without even trying to. WAKING LIFE, Linklater's cult rotoscoped philosophical film might be the most Linklater-ian experience I've had in my life and it helped me defined the limits of the controlled collegiate experience I'm willing to put myself through on film.

WAKING LIFE is a non-narrative movie. It's the story of a young man (Wiley Wiggins), stumbling through a dream he cannot seem to wake up from. In this dream, he meets several people with elaborate, sometimes scientific opinions about the meaning of life, free will, lucid dreams, film theory and several other fascinating subjects the collegiate types love to talk about. The protagonist also sometimes stumble upon cryptic clues about his condition, and other people who are aware of inhabiting his dream. WAKING LIFE is entirely rotoscoped, which means it was shot with real actors and that a team of artist went over every frame in order to add colours and cartoonish themes. The movie, just like being caught in a dream, doesn't have a clear beginning or ending, and it kind of doesn't have a climax either. Fortunately, it was not the point.

I like the idea of WAKING LIFE, on paper. It's sort of a documentary with no subject, wearing an experimental cartoon costume. There's really nothing quite like it, although it's closer to actual experience than several documentaries and fictions. Part of what makes WAKING LIFE fun is the familiarity. You've had a life-affirming intellectual conversation at some point if your existence. You've met weirdos you've talked with until the wee hours of the morning around an intoxicating substance of your choice, most likely in college or in an early period of your life when your life didn't have much structure, you didn't know shit about anything and everything seemed possible although you didn't know exactly what you should do next. WAKING LIFE is Richard Linklater's most intellectual movie, but it's coated with a subtle varnish of nostalgia.

There are cool, dream allusions to real-life events and other Linklater movies scattered throughout.

I guess WAKING LIFE is an important movie because of the quality of its content, the original nature of its screenplay and the random, balls-out decision of rotoscoping the entire freakin' thing. I though the presentation sucked tough. I mean, 20-30 minutes of stumbling from one monologue to another is fascinating. 45 minutes at max. But since the movie had no narrative arc outside of the protagonist being tapped in a dream, something unusual happened to me: I got bored. It happens when I've understood the pattern, when a movie doesn't have surprises left to offer me. WAKING LIFE doesn't add up to anything greater than the sum of its parts. Some of you will think it's unfair that I wasn't bored by Richard Linklater's SLACKER and that I'm bagging on a similarly built film from the same director for the same reasons that I liked the other. Long story short, SLACKER isn't a movie about a quest for meaning. I would've loved WAKING LIFE to at least try and form a coherent hypothesis from all these ''testimonies''.

WAKING LIFE is an original, cerebral and quirky movie that lives up to Richard Linklater's peculiar and quietly whimsical legacy. At some point, style take over substance when you find out that the dots aren't meant to be connected, which is something I philosophically and narratively take offense to. Past a certain point, intellectual longings for the meaning of existence turn into masturbation and WAKING LIFE unfortunately crosses that line. Overall, it's a decent movie, but it doesn't know where to go or when to stop, so it becomes exhausting to the viewer. Not my favourite Richard Linklater film by any means. It's not something that I would be interested to revisit, unless I'm looking for confrontation. Richard Linklater is a talented writer and director, yet I thought WAKING LIFE was busy admiring these skills more than displaying them.

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