June 28–July 5, 2001

movie shorts

A.I.

by Sam Adams

In a world where truth in advertising reigns, we might see something like this on the posters for the much-hyped A.I.: "The emotionalism of Stanley Kubrick meets the intellectual rigor of Steven Spielberg!" You can’t expect anything quite so straightforward (or sarcastic) from the marketing folks at Warner Bros., who’ve opted, supposedly according to Kubrick’s plan, to withhold all but the most basic information about A.I.’s plot, opting instead for an elaborately cryptic series of interconnected websites (featuring characters who never appear in the movie) and commercials focusing on Haley Joel Osment’s doe-eyed countenance.

This turns out to have been a wise strategy for a number of reasons: both because, as Kubrick insisted with Eyes Wide Shut, the element of surprise is more and more important in a media-saturated society, and because A.I. is a lot more interesting in concept than it is in execution. Who wouldn’t be interested in a beyond-the-grave collaboration between the chilly, precise Kubrick and the grandiose, melodramatic Spielberg — if only for the reason we’re interested in highway accidents? Based on Brian Aldiss’ 1969 short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," A.I. began life as a Kubrick project in the early 1980s, taking two decades to finally reach the screen. After going through several permutations with screenwriter Ian Watson (who receives "screen story" credit on A.I.), the project eventually passed to Spielberg with Kubrick’s blessing; Kubrick apparently intended to produce the film himself, but died before the script was completed. Still, Spielberg has said that the film is heavily based on the 90-page treatment constructed by Kubrick, and that in some respects, he was merely helping to realize Kubrick’s vision.

The result is an often ungainly fusion of two drastically different sensibilities. Visually, the film is replete with immense, austere Kubrickian vistas, from a vast white-on-white hospital complex to the glacial caverns in which much of its final chapter takes place. And clearly, the very nature of the film, its designs to explore the limits of artificially constructed consciousness, draws heavily on the themes Kubrick dramatized in 2001: A Space Odyssey. More saliently, the film seems fundamentally designed to work on the level of ideas, not character. Even Kubrick’s admirers (of which, it should be noted, I am not one) will admit that his films are mainly devoid of emotion, idea plays in which the details of character are secondary at best. A movie like Eyes Wide Shut shows precisely the limitations of Kubrick’s approach. There was no avoiding that the film’s primary imperative was to explore the relationship between a husband and wife, but since neither character was recognizably human, Kubrick was driven to ever more absurd metaphorical lengths to dramatize the tension in their marriage. Spielberg, of course, never met a human emotion whose throat he wouldn’t joyfully wring. So it is that A.I.’s high-toned theme is played out in the most prosaic, trite manner imaginable. I can’t be the only person whose heart sunk when he heard the phrase "the first robot programmed to love" in the trailer.

In case you haven’t figured out that A.I. is a movie of ideas, the film begins with a tedious, dramatically inert scene in which the film’s master scientist (William Hurt) explains his intentions to a conference room full of robot — or, as they’re called, "mecha" — engineers. Since, in the future, severe limitations have been placed on couples’ rights to bear children, he proposes to serve both science and the marketplace by crafting a robotic child who will love its adoptive family as much as any real child would. He’s then peppered with questions which clumsily lay out the film’s themes, among them one which goes something like this: "We can teach a robot to love. But will humans love him in return?"

The robokid, christened David, is bequeathed to a family whose own single son is in a seemingly irreversible coma, the theory being they’d be even more likely than a childless couple to attach themselves to a pseudo-child. As played by Haley Joel Osment (whose own incessant cuteness has a distinct odor of the robotic), David is, not to mince words, incredibly creepy. Children of the Corn creepy. Village of the Damned creepy. Perhaps the creepiest onscreen preteen since that kid sliced through the guy’s Achilles tendon in Pet Sematary.

No doubt David’s supposed to be inhuman. But in Spielberg’s cosmos, where emotions don’t exist to be explained so much as exploited, it’s simply baffling that his surrogate family wouldn’t be so overcome with a case of the skeeves that they’d ship him out on the first robobus. The scene where David’s "mother" (Frances O’Connor) speaks the seven-word code that irreversibly "imprints" him to her is so clotted with radiant light and early morning fog (you can actually see smoke rising past the camera in close-up) you’d think you’d stumbled into a cotton factory, but there’s not a hint of explanation as to why she’s gone from shutting David in a closet to wanting to tickle his toes. It happens because the story requires it, no more.

The film picks up inestimably when Jude Law enters the mix. His Gigolo Joe is a mechanical prostitute with a servo-assisted swagger in his hips. A cross between A Clockwork Orange’s Alex and Jiminy Cricket, he’s both seductive and sprightly, swooshing his PVC trenchcoat and clicking his heels when the occasion merits. Unlike David, he’s not meant to be convincingly human (or, at least, not all his parts are); his face has a shiny, rubberized texture and his unbroken hairline looks like something out of Charles Burns’ Dog Boy. Law’s performance strikes the only notes of complexity or humor in the entire film, and he’s sorely missed when he’s finally dragged up into the sky.

Still, Spielberg lacks the perverse imagination to give Gigolo Joe’s scenes the needed kick. Even when he drags David to the erotic pleasure palaces of Rouge City, the film drops the ball — how can you have a building modeled after a woman’s lower half and not show where the door is? Likewise, Spielberg’s imagination of the "Flesh Fair," a dystopian freak show where robots are torn to pieces in front of angry human audiences, is simply embarrassing; with its flashing lights, dated industrial music and Pa Kettle audience (good to know they still wear overalls in the future), it plays like nothing so much as a Twisted Sister video (with better production values, of course). In the best of his most recent films — Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan— Spielberg has (finally) begun to show an ability to examine the dark side of human nature, but in A.I. he reverts to sugarcoating, which more or less saws the legs out from under the entire story. It’s why you end up with a movie based around such a hackneyed, unexamined truism as "the ability to love is what separates human beings from machines." What about the capacity for vanity, or angst or any number of familiar, utterly irrational traits? Here, the early and frequent invocation of the l-word just seems like the most convenient way to juice up the string section. And I haven’t even mentioned that the film turns into a reimagination of the original Pinocchio story, blue fairy and all. Or the ludicrous deux ex machina which completely sinks the already foundering film in the last 20 minutes. Or the fact that William Hurt simply shouldn’t be allowed in any more movies, ever. Something else humans possess that robots don’t: the ability to be bored out of our skulls.