A Scanner Darkly: B+

This is one trippy, occasionally senseless, comical stoner dream of dark importance. Richard Linklater, as I'm now quite certain, has mastered the peaks and lulls of human speech. He first tested it out in Dazed and Confused, his 70's-set ensemble piece, then he perfected it with the one-two punch of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. He notices the twitches in a conversation, the stuttering and the pauses. He has not only an ear for dialogue he has an innate talent for monlogues. His latest movie, A Scanner Darkly, is set "7 years from now" and follows the story of one undercover narcotics agent, named Robert "Bob" Arctor (Keanu Reeves), in his quest to root out the higher-ups in the network of suppliers for the latest and deadliest drug "Substance D". Among his circle of friends, which are his primary suspects, are James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), a man who talks dizzying cirlces of verbal eloquence around himself in any given conversation, Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), the surfer-dude of the group, James Freck (Rory Cochrane), the furthest along the dark path of mental breakdown that is Substance's biggest "side-effect", and Bob's girlfriend Donna Hawthorne (Winno Ryder). The world is consumed by drugs, early on we hear a statistic that quotes "20f the population is addicted", and the one organization that is trying to stop this overflow of toxic substance? New Path, the modern day Betty Ford clinic and quite worthy of some suspicion themselves. The movie is practically coated in paranoia-charged betrayals and mistrusts, in addition to being animated in a completely new way. The shadows themselves seem to define the physical characters. There is darting wit here and Robert Downey Jr. turns in another perfect performance, he is the most underrated actor working today. There is a perverse and black humor and this story is not a happy one (although the ending hints at a light at the far end of the tunnel). Underneath it all is a basic sort of intelligence that understands more than anything else the insidious nature of suspicion itself: whethere it be deserved or not it breeds only more chaos. Keanu Reeves wear's a suit of eternally shifting faces and personalities during his "desk work" and as his brain starts to eat itself into two parts the suit itself becomes an entity. There is a metaphor buried there, that in the beginning Reeves, as a narc, could be anybody and that is comforting. By the end he is a drug fiend who could be anybody, and that is terrifying.