Waking Life

It’s clear almost immediately that Waking Life‘s been geared almost exclusively towards followers and fans of various philosophical ideas, as the film is essentially a series of seemingly endless lectures delivered by several disparate figures. It’s just as obvious, however, that neophytes to the many theories proffered by filmmaker Richard Linklater will be left out in the cold (there’s certainly no storyline or actual characters for viewers to latch onto). The movie follows actor Wiley Wiggins through a particularly eventful series of lucid dreams, where he encounters a whole host of chatty folks – each with their own perspective on the meaning of life. Waking Life is initially kind of interesting – albeit on an incredibly sporadic basis – but the ceaseless prattle eventually becomes mind-numbing and meaningless. It doesn’t help that the majority of this stuff comes off as pompous and utterly nonsensical, though there are one or two compelling moments mixed in with the chaff (the sequence in which Before Sunrise costars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have a brief dream-related discussion is an obvious highlight). The novelty of the much-lauded animation style wears off about halfway through, with the end result a film that’s more interminable than anything else.

* out of ****