by Raymond Teague

Waking Life (2001, 99 minutes, R)

"The ongoing WOW! is happening right now," exclaims a psychedelic man in this amazingly surreal, insightful, intelligent, questioning film.

The film itself is a "WOW!" -- a revolutionary vehicle for examining the meaning of life and ultimate Truth, whatever it is, that is eerily realistic and amusingly comic book-like. Through a new technique that involves filming live actors and then animating them, Waking Life not only captures our known reality but also revels in abstract thought and conversations about the nature of reality.

The plot is deceptively simple -- as deceptively simple perhaps as reality itself? -- but the structure opens up ideas and topics that are certainly not simplistic, at least to the human mind. The film, directed by Richard Linklater and written by him and members of the cast, follows one unnamed young man (played by Wiley Wiggins) possibly stuck in a dream in which he encounters an engaging variety of people with all sorts of opinions about life, spirituality, metaphysics, quantum physics, psychology, morals and society.

What the film has to say about these topics is another "WOW!" -- a virtual buffet feast of ideas rapidly served but not necessarily carefully prepared. That is, the characters' thoughts are sometimes reasoned and articularly presented, but sometimes scattered and spontaneous, off the top of their heads. Some ideas are rough, wild conjecture and startling, from characters equally wild and startling (such as the man who sets himself afire "to let my own lack of a voice be heard"); these ideas can be difficult to digest. Other ideas seem seasoned and settling, from characters who obviously have contemplated much; these seem naturally pleasing at a gut level.

The really big "WOW!" is just having all these fascinating people wondering about life for an hour and a half and offering observations on important ideas basic to who we are and what we are doing on this planet. Like most of us, the characters don't claim to have everything figured out or to have all the answers. But it is enough -- a big enough -- that they have questioning minds and the desire to think about life itself. It's enough that they care about the Big Questions and not just the mundane world of matter, money, politics, and sexual relations.

Waking Life has the potential to jumpstart people to think more for themselves about the meaning of existence.

Here are some of the most intriguing "WOW!" explorations that the film artfully presents about what could be termed the waking life of our dreams:

-- "Your life is yours to create."

-- "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... I think it's what we live for."

-- "I believe reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is."

-- "I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving."

-- "Maybe I exist only in your mind."

-- "It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences."

-- "The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness...To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence."

-- "They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

-- "The worst mistake that you can make is to think that you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room."

-- History is "the playing out of subatomic particles."

-- "Whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting."

-- "On really romantic nights of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion."

-- "Doesn't it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called a dream body?"

-- "It's the dream -- it's like I'm being prepared for something."

-- "There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity."

WOW! Think about those concepts and then see Waking Life to connect the people to the quotations and the quotations to your own waking/dreaming life.

And remember through all of your own explorations to appreciate the present and its wonders because that "ongoing WOW! is happening right now."