C-

The protagonist of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” is a young fellow (Wally Wiggins) who’s living a dream–a succession of gauzy, fragmentary episodes in which he listens impassively as a wide assortment of voluble characters philosophize about human existence or the lack thereof, or provide examples of pure oddity. (The apparently aimless structure has a lot in common with that employed in Linklater’s first feature, the amiably shambling 1991 “Slacker,” which featured characters discoursing as they randomly bumped into one another.) Eventually our unnamed hero tires of being unable to escape from this peculiar state; he complains over and over again that he feels trapped in an endless cycle and longs for release, though none seems forthcoming. (He may, it’s suggested, be dead, and what he’s experiencing either his long last fragmentary thoughts or an endless afterlife.) By the end of the movie, unfortunately, we can sympathize with him all too well; for despite its visual imagination, Linklater’s picture is, whatever the title suggests, a pretentious snoozer.

Much has been made of the technical side of “Waking Life.” It’s an animated film, but the effect is very different from what one’s accustomed to, since it’s been made by rotoscoping–coloring over (via computers, of course) filmed live footage. Of course, human imagination decides how any individual sequence will be finished, and what additions might be made to the composition. Some of the choices are clever: when a man is talking about the body as a machine, for instance, his face turns into a gear, and when another character speaks of the human form as being primarily water, we see its aquatic component emerge before our eyes. People morphing into clouds or floating into the air make for beautiful moments, too. And the overall look that’s achieved, with all the various elements of a scene bobbing about at different rates, as if each were atop a distinct wave in an unseen sea, has the intended effect of disorienting us further; the result, while unsettling (some may find a dose of motion-sickness medicine useful in controlling their queasiness), often lends an eerie beauty to the images.

But the circular, repetitive premise and the verbal stream-of-consciousness in Linklater’s script quickly grow tedious. That wouldn’t be the case if the snatches of monologues and conversations that he’s devised had any real profundity to them, but most consist of the sort of arid, half-baked pseudo-intellectual blather that one’s apt to hear among sophomores in a university dorm during a late-night bull session. Far too many of the segments include lines like “You know, Timothy Leary once said”–a name-dropping crutch which suggests that Linklater is intent on demonstrating how many authors he’s familiar with (but, paradoxically, how little he’s able to discriminate among what he’s read). Some of “Waking Life” consists of rants of one sort or another, some of snippets of scientific observation on the nature of life and thought, some of speculations on the essence of the dream-state and death. If there’s an overarching point of view to all the verbiage, it’s basically an existentialist one which implies the importance of seizing opportunities and deciding to act in the moment. But surely existentialism, as a philosophical system, is a late twentieth-century phenomenon which now seems more than a little dated and naive. And even if it weren’t, it’s not presented here in a sufficiently coherent fashion to be very meaningful. Nor is there much humor to the script; almost everything is presented with a dogged seriousness that, given the often puerile content, comes across as absurd.

“Words are inert–they’re dead, you know?” a character observes early on in Linklater’s film. One may be tempted to observe, even while admiring the images the director offers us, that at least insofar as the ones that make up “Waking Life” are concerned, the statement seems pretty accurate. While there’s a good deal in the picture to excite the eye, there’s not much to stimulate the ear or, more importantly, to engage the mind.

C

“One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest” might be a better title for this heavy-handed combination of whimsy, sentiment and false profundity from director Iain Softley; the only question is “One what?” The script, adapted by Charles Leavitt from a novel by Gene Brewer, concerns (as did Eliseo Subiela’s 1986 “Man Facing Southeast”) a fellow in a psychiatric hospital who claims to be a visitor from another planet (in this case one called K-PAX). Though his analyst is understandably skeptical at first, the patient exhibits a thoroughly foreign manner and inexplicable scientific knowledge. This being a Hollywood product, of course, he also has a highly beneficial effect on the other inmates of the asylum–all of them stock figures from Screenwriting 101, it seems (the Tennessee Williams-style recluse, an obsessive-compulsive nebbish, a guy who’s terrified of germs, a woman who won’t speak, a burly fellow who finds that everyone else smells bad)–and teaches his doctor to wake up from his workaholic ways and stop to smell the roses, especially as regards his family.

This is very formulaic stuff, and it bogs down badly in the second half, when the doctor tracks down what he believes to be his patient’s human past, partially through regression therapy involving hypnosis. The initial seventy minutes are ponderous and preachy, but there’s sufficient interest generated by the cast and director to keep the viewer intrigued. The remaining fifty, however, grow increasingly heavy-handed and cloying, and when they’re capped by a denouement that practically ushers in angelic choirs to appear uplifting while also doing backflips to remain ambiguous, the level of manipulation has become insufferable. The slender tale has been loaded down with so much Hollywood contrivance and phony piety that it collapses under the weight.

One can divert oneself, nonetheless, by concentrating on Kevin Spacey, who has a field day playing Prot (pronounced with a long “o,” note), the mysterious stranger who asserts that he’s an alien, appears to be able to discern light waves imperceptible to other humans, says he travels far faster than hyperdrive, and knows far more about distant constellations than he should. Strictly speaking, it’s not a very good performance; it’s just a succession of tricks and gimmicks, from the charming way Prot cocks his head to his precious voice modulation to the cute little walk he periodically adopts. (A scene in which he converses with a dog will undoubtedly draw sighs from all the canine-lovers in the audience, too.) Audiences will eat it up, though, and it’s understandable why Spacey should have chosen to seize the chance to show off. Only a curmudgeon would point out that in his earlier work (through “American Beauty”) the actor specialized in roles that radiated intelligence and edginess, but now (with “Pay It Forward” and this picture) he’s choosingthe sorts of parts that his old idol Jack Lemmon might have essayed on his off days. It may be fun to watch Spacey pull off this kind of thing, but watching him makes one yearn for the old Kevin to come back.

As the other half of what’s essentially a two-character effort, Jeff Bridges is disappointing. He did well playing a variant of Spacey’s character back in 1984’s “Starman,” but on the other side of the desk he’s simply dull. It’s not really the actor’s fault–as last year’s “The Contender,” in which he was practically the sole saving grace, showed, Bridges is still capable of energetic performances–but here the script offers him little to work with. He’s pretty much reduced to pushing papers around, smiling knowingly, and tossing his glasses down in frustration from time to time; and his one big scene, in which he visits the former home of a man he suspects was Prot in earlier life, the fact that he’s made to stumble upon one telling clue after another (each of them followed immediately by an overwrought flashback) destroys any emotional honesty it might have had. (The script also has an unfortunate tendency to have somebody offhandedly mouth a remark rendering all too explicit something that’s already been shown–a device which has the unfortunate result of treating the audience like a bunch of dumbbells.)

It’s this persistent lack of subtlety that’s the major flaw in Softley’s direction. In his last film, “The Wings of the Dove,” the young Englishman demonstrated considerable skill and grace in adapting James’ prose to the screen, but in the present instance he seems more interested in giving his film a gleaming, almost metallic surface–something that he and cinematographer John Mathieson achieve quite nicely, to be sure–than in anything else. He treats the leads too deferentially, giving them all too free a rein, and he fails to impose a proper rhythm on the many episodes. The result is fatal. “K-PAX” wants desperately to soar, but it stays resolutely earthbound; it aims to create a sense of wonder, but all a viewer will wonder after seeing it is how so many talented people could have been misled into participating in such a stilted cinematic exercise.