PhilPaine.com

Richard Lin­klater’s Dazed and Con­fused (1993) has an endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. It was an ensem­ble piece, focus­ing on a dozen char­ac­ters, all young, unknown actors at the time. Ben Affleck, among them, went on to a major film career. But when­ev­er I dis­cuss the film with any­one, they always fix on one per­for­mance, that of Wiley Wig­gins, who played an amaz­ing­ly lik­able char­ac­ter that saved the film from being too pat­ly cyn­i­cal. Lin­klater wise­ly employed Wig­gins again to play the cen­tral char­ac­ter in Wak­ing Life. This off­beat 2001 film employs a com­bi­na­tion of roto­scope and com­put­er ani­ma­tion. Roto­scop­ing is a tech­nique that is usu­al­ly annoy­ing, but here it works per­fect­ly to put across the idea of lucid dream­ing. The sto­ry line involves a char­ac­ter who is trapped in a dream about being trapped in a dream, and sus­pi­cious that he is actu­al­ly dead. He con­stant­ly encoun­ters char­ac­ters who lec­ture him on var­i­ous con­ven­tion­al philo­soph­i­cal notions ― the stan­dard reper­toire of Exis­ten­tial­ism, Post­mod­ernism, etc, the kind of stuff that usu­al­ly makes me cringe. But the warmth of Wig­gins’ per­son­al­i­ty (his char­ac­ter is nev­er named) makes it all work, and the ani­ma­tion’s shift­ing styles and visu­al jokes are per­fect for por­tray­ing dream states. Some of the seg­ments are quite beautiful.