Film Review: A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ** (out of 5)
In a near future ravaged by global weather changes and the imminent demise of the human race, a cybernetics entrepreneur invents a boy robot programmed to love people unconditionally.
Destined to be the most curious film of the year, Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is audacious and disturbing enough to deserve its pedigree as an unfinished Stanley Kubrick project, and just aimless enough to miss its goals by about a mile. It begins as a brilliantly executed conceit: Spielberg, wunderkind of seventies blockbuster cinema, is doing a fine job of finishing the last big project by Kubrick, enfant terrible of the sixties. Then it all turns to narrative muck halfway through, a clogged thicket of intentions that no one found a means to clear away before the cameras rolled.
It would be meaningless to talk about A.I. without comparing Kubrick and Spielberg, two of the most important, influential film directors the U.S. has ever produced. They discussed this project for years, at first by telephone, then in person whenever Spielberg was in England, where the Bronx-born Kubrick made his home. The talk originally centered around visual effects, Kubrick looking for the best way to produce realistic robots on-screen, but the discussion eventually encompassed the entire film, the two filmmakers becoming close enough friends that, at one point, Kubrick suggested A.I. might be a better project for Spielberg than himself.
Kubrick finally shelved A.I. in the mid-nineties, after a decade of development and planning, to make his now famous final effort Eyes Wide Shut (1999), another film he had planned for years. When he died suddenly and unexpectedly in March of 1999, his widow offered Spielberg all of her husband’s notes and treatments for A.I., telling him it was his project now, if he wanted it.
It’s easy to see why Kubrick would have thought Spielberg was the man for the job: A.I. recasts the story of Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be a real boy, as a dark fairy tale for mature viewers, the quest of a childlike robot named David seeking maternal love in a world fraught with dangers, even in the secluded environment of an upper middle class suburb. Rejected by his human mother after her biological son is revived from a coma, David wanders through a society on the verge of extinction, trapped in a bizarre final conflict between human beings and the machines of their own creation.
Now, in any world Kubrick made, there would be scant room for a robot to become a real boy, no matter how he was programmed. Kubrick’s most fantastic settings are rooted in a meticulous scientific vision that, at the very least, circumvents magic when it doesn’t patently dismiss it. But Spielberg has never let science stop him, nor much of anything else, dabbling successfully in everything from pop metaphysics to an unnerving dramatization of the Holocaust. He has the clout, the resources, and the box-office record, to make all of Hollywood jump at his softest hiccup, and he is a devoted student of Kubrick’s movies, with the added advantage of having known him and been a friend of the family.
But Spielberg is not a patient man, nor a very serious one, and he is decidedly anything but meticulous. The most visible talent of the first film school generation, he initially made his reputation by inventing his own form of pastiche, a unique style that was not so much a celebration of any particular filmmaker or genre as it was a synthesis of Hollywood conventions. But in A.I. he is taking on an altogether different kind of challenge. Not simply paying homage to a beloved mentor, he’s attempting to finish the work of a man whose creative instincts and working methods were diametrically opposed to his own.
Stanley Kubrick’s personality, and his indomitable will, were forces of nature; his most frequently measurable effect as a moviemaker was in setting off a chill of uncomfortable recognition traveling up the collective spine. Even if he did a little bit of pastiche here and there, it was only to establish the boundaries of his narrative experiments. By the time he was finished with a genre piece, it was unrecognizable as anything but a Stanley Kubrick film, clear-eyed, often cruelly unsentimental, and especially free of the usual cinematic nonsense.
For the first half of A.I. these differences don’t matter very much. Spielberg’s screenplay, his first solo writing since Close Encounters, is masterful in the early stages, a thoughtful, witty exposition of accepted “normalcy” that strips away goopy cultural assumptions about the purity of motherhood and childhood, while concocting an eerie blend of Kubrick’s austerely lit, careful compositions with his own tendencies toward exaggerated imagery and rhythmic montage. So far so good: the telling of David’s origins, his bonding with a human family and his traumatic separation from them, is a pleasing mesh of Kubrick’s fascination with incongruous dramatic situations and Spielberg’s skill with family dynamics, especially the mother/child connection, and the often unspoken (in movies, anyway) Machiavellian behavior of children.
But the moment David begins his journey of self discovery away from home, A.I. slowly comes apart, the narrative paths scattering to all points of the compass just when they should be settling on a destination. David’s odyssey through a couple of loosely imagined underworlds is fragmented and uninspired; he meets several more characters, both human and mechanical, who are completely disconnected from other sections of the movie. Finally, Spielberg loses track altogether of the territory he has chosen to explore: unlike Pinocchio, David never learns the lessons of honor, courage and sacrifice that (according to the fairy tale, anyway) comprise what it means to be human. For that matter, he doesn’t learn much of anything. He’s a robot.
As the world grows nastier and more inhospitable, David simply becomes fixated on his human mother to a cosmic degree, stuck somewhere at the emotional level and complexity of a newborn, and the idea of robot-as-Pinocchio is never explored beyond a few pat allusions. Of course, there is a palpable sense of Kubrick’s influence operating in the film’s rejection of its own inspiration, a trait that led to increasingly problematic movies as his career moved into its last two decades. Instead of Pinocchio’s magical epiphany of what it means to be alive, other ways are found to resolve the plot that vaguely echo both 2001 and Close Encounters without committing to either. The issues of consciousness suggested by the title, the vagaries of filial love and how they inform the experience of being human, are never adequately addressed, leaving moviegoers with a strange finale that has neither Kubrick’s ambiguity, nor Spielberg’s awestruck optimism. Although the fade out contains a sentiment worthy of both directors at their best, the path leading there is confused, sloppy, and ultimately incoherent.
Strange as it may sound (particularly to Kubrick fans) A.I. could have profited from Spielberg revisiting a film by another of his major influences, Walt Disney, whose Pinocchio (1940) remains an outstanding animated feature packed with good old menace, mystery and storytelling magic. This is not to suggest he should have conformed the whole movie to that template, but merely to say that a filmmaker can glean much from seeing it done right, no matter who they are, or where they are in their career. David doesn’t need to become a real boy for the story to work, but he sure as hell needs to move closer to human.
There’s a worn but sturdy Hollywood maxim that applies here: ask not what your movie is about — your movie is about its last ten minutes. Given the last ten minutes of this movie, there’s an awful lot of unsettled material in what goes on before: a patchwork midsection with only a perfunctory relationship to the beginning or the ending, neither of which are especially related, either. There are three separate movies here, and only the first one has much relevance to the theme.
The always wonderful Haley Joel Osment hits all the right notes as David, regardless of what the script requires, one of the best child actors the movies have ever found, and Jude Law gives much more than the script asks for as a pleasure robot on the run from the authorities, as does Frances O’Connor, criminally underrated by the mainstream critics thus far, portraying David’s tragically conflicted mother with intelligence and heart. But great acting does not help a mediocre script become a good movie, any more than state of the art special effects do — and A.I. has some potentially unforgettable imagery at each of its tenuously connected stages. The fact that Spielberg is able to command such fine performances, over and over, from a peerless, cutting edge cast makes the film’s failures all the more aggravating.
Vision is an ethereal state of creativity, capricious and elusive. Filmmakers of all stripes construct elaborate working conditions to place themselves in their own optimal frame of mind to make it happen. Perhaps the hurlyburly confusion of A.I. was intentional, and Spielberg is only the messenger, and we’ll all look back in ten years and realize A.I. was some sort of minor classic. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever fully liked or appreciated a Kubrick film on first viewing (except for Dr. Strangelove), which is all a part of his continuing perverse appeal, and Spielberg’s fine tuned simplicity has been known to throw me a few curves, as well. But the more probable scenario is this: Stanley Kubrick never found a satisfying way to end this movie, and neither has Steven Spielberg
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
written and directed by Steven Spielberg; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams
with: Haley Joel Osment (David), Frances O’Connor (Monica Swinton), Jude Law (Gigolo Joe), William Hurt (Prof. Hobby)
2 hr., 26 m.; Warner Bros. Pictures, rated PG-13
release date: June 29
NOTES:
THE MENTOR: Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) left several unfinished and/or abandoned projects at his death, most regrettably his film about Napoleon, which was scrapped after years of research and writing because he could not find suitable financing that would also leave him in creative control of the finished product.
The best observer of Kubrick’s working methods and personality, Michael Herr (a co-screenwriter of Full Metal Jacket, 1987), has suggested that the filmmaker also left his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, unfinished, in spite of studio claims to the contrary. The speculation has more than idle validity: it’s a well documented fact Kubrick tinkered with the structure and editing of all his films right down to the final hour of release, and Eyes Wide Shut runs twenty minutes longer than any film over which he had final cut except Barry Lyndon (1975), a movie that wears its length quite purposefully.
Kubrick’s entire oeuvre, including two rare documentary shorts, consists of 15 films made over a span of 49 years.
BUSY-BUSY-BUSY: Steven Spielberg (b. 1947) has already moved on to another production at this writing, a thriller entitled Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. Since his first feature film, Sugarland Express (1973), he has directed 15 movies of his own (16 in 28 years), produced the films of many, many others, and helped found the first new, major American movie studio since the days of silent cinema, DreamWorks SKG (Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen).His third film, Close Encounters, is filled with allusions to Disney’s Pinocchio.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
