Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Spielberg
Starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Sam Robards
USA, 2001
NEW WORLD FAIRYTALE
I don’t think there’s anything profoundly ridiculous about a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, two of the most famous filmmakers in history and two very different minds. Kubrick, who passed away in 1999, had been obsessed with making a movie out of Brain Aldiss’ 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” for many years and was waiting for technological advances that would allow the film’s apocalyptic, futuristic setting to be depicted realistically. When he died, Steven Spielberg, whom he had once asked to direct the film, took on the project and it has resulted in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, one of the two or three most exciting movies to hit theaters this summer, and certainly the most challenging.
So much has been written and said about it since it was released a few weeks ago (adding my two cents might be redundant), and some are reacting negatively to what Spielberg has done with the story of a child robot named David (Haley Joel Osment) programmed to unconditionally love the person who imprints him. Obviously it’s Spielberg’s preference of the emotional over the cerebral that they dislike; Kubrick was the exact opposite. Jonathan Rosenbaum has already pointed out that their contradicting styles are like two halves of a whole, and what may have been a schizophrenic mess is, I think, a unified mess, a superb mess with ideas and emotions flying about, daring you to answer all the questions the film poses. I don’t believe there’s a film that has challenged me to think harder since I saw Persona three years ago, and this is a Hollywood movie.
A.I. can be considered Spielberg’s return to his early fascination with strange forms of life. I don’t think he’s made a film greater than Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Schindler’s List, his declaration of adulthood, was formally great, but the two sci-fi masterpieces he made earlier on in his remarkable career were personal, and personally moving. They were about loneliness, friendship, and awe in their most needy, immature forms; the characters were in their own little worlds, oblivious to things going on outside of what they were pursuing. A.I. is known for its Kubrickian themes, its connection to the technology-driven universe in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Christian themes in A Clockwork Orange, but the emotional dimension of the film is territory Spielberg has tread on in his past.
The “mecha” (short for “mechanical”) David is related to Roy and Elliot in the two previous films in this unofficial trilogy. When he is abandoned in the forest by his adopted human mother (Frances O’Connor) with only the super-toy Teddy (the voice of Jack Angel) to keep him company, his quest to become real like the puppet Pinocchio did in Carlo Collodi’s story is lonely and is carried out with a feverish, possessed intensity. He has lost the one woman he lives for and he has no adult figure to guide him through the harsh world; he stares wide-eyed at unkindness and debauchery and makes friends with the closest grown-up around, the sex robot Gigolo Joe (the excellent Jude Law, combining the stiff motion of machines with the fluid movement of dancers like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly). But he makes no loving connections with beings from the “other race,” apart from the programmed love he has for his mother. In Close Encounters and E.T., the characters were in awe of the amiable aliens and came to love them, and this became a symbol for our desire to communicate with the unknown and how the unknown is not necessarily evil. In A.I., what might have once been unfathomable in a human society has become the latest battle between man and technology- robots and humans coexist.
There is no awe or pleasure there because artificiality is being posed as authenticity; human egos are getting bruised, and there is no distance between the two life forms. In one sequence, Gigolo Joe is trying to help David find the Blue Fairy so he can become a real boy and earn the love of his mommy. They go to Rouge City, which, with its neon lights and sexual services is not unlike the Pleasure Island where Pinocchio gets into trouble with the delinquent Foulfellow in the Disney movie. They consult the hologram Dr. Know (the voice of Robin Williams), an Internet-like resource containing every bit of information known to man, or, as the film suggests, all the information the authorities will let you know. After several attempts at trying to learn where the Blue Fairy lives, Joe finally combines the categories of “Flat Fact” and “Fairy Tale,” which refers back to the theme of blurring fantasy and truth.
Spielberg’s best movies are poignant childhood stories, and they’re encouraging, idealistic fantasies rooted in realistic fiction and the dreamy tales and life-affirming Disney movies we experience so strongly as children. Even in Schindler’s List, Spielberg was reassuring us, comforting us. The movie wasn’t about genocide but about hope. This is his first film, I think, in which the hope isn’t untarnished. If there is any real hope in this movie, it’s of the most desperate kind, hope that is mournful of the passing of humanity and all emotion. People accuse Spielberg for the gooiness of A.I.’s coda, which was actually imagined by Kubrick. Spielberg is not an idiot. David’s mission to find the Blue Fairy is a strange one, an unsettling meeting of optimistic and outlandish fairytale plot twists and the chilling cold shower of reality.
Spielberg, who, referring to several previous drafts and ideas, wrote the script himself, calls to mind Dorothy’s journey back home in The Wizard of Oz, and when Dr. Know actually tells David and Gigolo Joe where the Blue Fairy can be found, one is apt to feel that the script is even more implausible than L. Frank Baum’s book, which unveiled the Wizard as an imposter. It’s so ridiculous; we know, and we know that Spielberg knows, there is no Blue Fairy. Yet Spielberg balances this with the constant uneasiness lying not so far beneath the surface of the movie, and with the surreal, but almost believable, scenes that follow. Once he has reached “the ends of the Earth” at the tragically submerged Manhattan, David meets his maker, the unpleasant Dr. Hobby (played by William Hurt, whom I’ve always found quite unlikable anyway), who is delighted that David’s turned out to be a successful experiment and has shown motivation and thought beyond what any robot has done before him. David comes across another robot just like him and murders him in jealousy, yelling, “I’m special! I’m unique!” He also finds a whole line of manufactured Davids. This leads to a suicide attempt, and isn’t this why most kids kill themselves- because they don’t feel special and unique? These scenes have only increased in their disturbing, nightmarish power in the days after my second viewing of the film.
The film seems to be coming to a close when David, underwater with Teddy (his Jiminy Cricket and this movie’s only practical, sane character), finds a statue of the Blue Fairy in Coney Island and asks her to make him a real boy. The camera pulls back to reveal him and his idol trapped underneath a Ferris wheel. It’s a beautiful, elegiac, and tremendously disquieting image to end with (it reminded me of Radiohead’s recent computer-animated video “Pyramid Song” in which a stick figure character pulls up a chair to join the drowned and the dead in what looks to be a sunken ship). If Spielberg had chosen to conclude with that image, not only would it have been aesthetically better than the ending he has left us with, but it would also be the most adult statement he has made in his career. A.I. is a fairytale; if the fulfillment of David’s wish had remained ambiguous and unlikely, it would be a film that draws from Spielberg’s best, most heart-warming family movies, and one that slaps gullible idealism in the face with an ending as heartbreaking, wise, and realistic as the original, undisneyfied version of “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, in which the titular character spares the life of the human she loves by sacrificing herself. It would be an ending as realistic as a child’s fantasy can have.
However, Spielberg doesn’t end with that and this causes problems as well as a thought-provoking extension of A.I.’s themes. This only makes his movie more adult and more complex, though. The final third of the film is, in many ways, poorly handled. There’s a disgustingly intrusive, often unnecessary, voice-over narration, and the segment manages to be both rushed and overlong. But this is the first time Spielberg has taken on the jobs of both writer and director in more than twenty years and this ending exhibits the conflict between those two duties. The setting is two thousand years later, during a new Ice Age. The human race has died out and only strange versions of robots remain. They’re translucent and creepy and are fascinated with humans because they are the link to spirituality. David and Teddy are woken up and David’s mom is recreated for him with DNA. She appears in a daze and plays with her little robot boy for one single day. She’s confused but content and when she goes back to sleep and dies again, David is in bed with her and is able to experience sleep for the first time, presumably the sleep of death. The scenes are much too cluttered, and the mood is incongruous with the rest of the film; we have to hear verbal explanations from the Blue Fairy, an Ice Age robot, and the narrator.
The most frequent complaints are that the ending is overly sentimental and melodramatic, but if one assumes that this is a film to think about- and, because it’s so theme-heavy, that’s a safe assumption- there is more to that final segment than the outwardly happy ending. David’s victory is worthless because he has not received his mother’s love- she’s in such a stupor that she doesn’t know what she’s doing or where she is. And if he has achieved his goal of being a real boy, then that means that we humans can create things with emotions and goals and desires just like ourselves. And if that is true, doesn’t that reduce our uniqueness just a little bit? Are we really real then? What does it mean to be real? The film’s existentialism is not made as irritating as I have with these simple questions- to some, it is not even made noticeable- but I believe it is there nonetheless. Aldiss’ story clearly poses these questions. At one point, David asks Teddy, “How do you tell what are real things from what aren’t real things?” and “You and I are real, Teddy, aren’t we?”
There’s an antichristian and antireligious side to the film: in Rouge City, Gigolo Joe tells David that he picks up many customers at the church, and attendees at the Flesh Fair where mechas are blown to pieces are demonized by Spielberg in scenes reminiscent of Schindler’s List’s Holocaust imagery, even when their Christian belief that to be human is to be able to make choices is not exactly unsound and refers back to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Even the fact that these child mechas can be disowned once imprinted and destroyed by the manufacturers suggests that humans take no responsibility for the imitation-humans they create, just as some may think God refuses to take that same responsibility for the people that are born into this world. The most fascinating and perplexing thing about the coda is that David is treated as human by the highly developed robots, and he is the most human thing in that environment. The movie implies that humanity is relative. This makes it closer to Margery Williams’ “The Velveteen Rabbit” than “Pinocchio”; if I remember the story correctly, the stuffed animal becomes real according to how it is perceived by people.
John Williams’ sweet and syrupy score seems to conflict with that moodiness, but I think this is just Spielberg alluding to Close Encounters and E.T. and Empire of the Sun. He has taken his romanticism (and since when was that a bad thing?) and given it an edge, the bite of real life in the context of an unimaginably horrific future that distorts existence and actuality. When I saw A.I. the second time, I couldn’t deny that the ending was sentimental and touching more than it was weird and alarming. It was in bed that night, with thoughts running back and forth through my head, that I felt troubled by the movie. How happy is an ending where the last leftovers of the human race are two robots and a recreation of a woman from DNA, and where the last shot finds two of them (presumably) dying and one left all alone in a strange world?
Of course, this can all be taken from a logical perspective. David’s only need in life is to be loved by his mother. This sets him on a journey to win that love back after it has gone, and when he finds it after two millenniums, whether through the actual recreation of his mother or through self-delusion and dreaming, he is satisfied and is content to die with her. But I don’t think that is how the majority of audiences will take it, and I think Spielberg and Kubrick intended something murkier. Most will either choose to see it as another one of Spielberg’s heart-warming endings, not unlike “Pinocchio,” or as something reminiscent of Kubrick’s dark suppositions. As conservative or lazy as it may sound, I like to think that it’s, ultimately, both. It is a happy ending in a certain context- David gets what he wants. It’s also frightening and sad because it tells us that we can never reach complete and utter peace, oneness, and the fulfillment of our dreams; we can only hope to get it in a roundabout, illusory way, and all we will get is a slight glimpse of that happiness.
Kubrick looked at things objectively, and his questions were big and moral. His tone was aloof, his visual style icy and distinct. His post-‘50s films were highly stylized yet his characters behaved more naturalistically than Spielberg’s, even though he wasn’t really a naturalist himself. But maybe that clash between the planned and the improvised is why the masses know his name but don’t really think of his films as favorites; recall Ryan O’Neal’s botched-up emotion at the deathbed of his child in Barry Lyndon, or Nicole Kidman’s unconvincing “But I do love you” at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg isn’t an intellectual; he gave us feelings we knew in our lives, and his use of editing and the camera complemented that. Though Spielberg mimics Kubrick’s style several times throughout the film, the imitations are mainly just allusions caught in Spielberg’s own style. The eeriness of the first third is Kubrickian- David’s home is sterile, with a lot of metal and curving walls- but the editing (by Michael Kahn) doesn’t push you away and Janusz Kaminski, one of my favorite working cinematographers, never achieves a feeling quite as alienating as those of the Kubrick movies; there’s the ghostly fluorescent backlighting but there’s also a good amount of camera movement, which is not a Kubrick trademark.
David’s adopted parents try to warm up to the idea of having a robot kid in the place of their biological son (Jake Thomas) who’s in a coma, and these scenes contain more complicated human interaction than you will find in most of Kubrick’s movies thanks to Spielberg’s sensitivity and Frances O’Connor and Sam Robards’ performances. David’s Oedipus complex is apparent even before he’s imprinted by his young mother. On his first night with them, he asks for mom to change him into pajamas, not dad. It’s a strange touch; why does the robot have a preference of parent? But the bizarre, incestuous undercurrents continue throughout the movie and are indisputable. There are a number of lines that are interestingly worded. Pleading with his mother not to leave him, he cries, “I’ll be so real for you.” When she wakes up two thousand years later, he says “I’ve found you” as if he were talking to his one true love. And she is his one true love. When her sickly real son returns home, she lavishes all her affection on him instead of the mecha, and David becomes envious. The sibling rivalry is fierce and tense.
There is no variation or subtlety to David’s love and this separates him from real humans. But we can accept him as human on many occasions; his manner becomes less stilted as the film progresses and his behavior becomes increasingly emotional. He even loses the waxy, doll-like texture of his face, only to have it remind us that he is a robot when it returns during the melodramatic ending. I don’t think this was unintentional. David’s emotions are real to him as our emotions are real to us, so how can his be fake? It’s stated in the film’s prologue that it’s more a question of whether human beings can bring themselves to love a robot, not the other way around. We can identify with David and still remember that he isn’t real; Spielberg’s emotionalism works and is the most provocative thing about A.I. because it allows us to have these multi-layered reactions, and Haley Joel Osment is so right for his role here because he has always been like a weird prodigy instead of a normal boy. Osment seems to understand what a director wants.
Kubrick’s (and Aldiss’) questions have given Spielberg something his movies have never really had- a philosophical aspect. It’s not vapid pontificating; these are questions we have been asking for ages. This is a Steven Spielberg movie, and that’s why it is flawed with much too much exposition and a hampered flow. If it were a Stanley Kubrick movie, I imagine his visual perfectionism would deprive us of some of the accessible feelings we get here, but the thoughts and ideas would have been more fleshed out, perhaps more identifiable. A.I. doesn’t answer the difficult questions and it doesn’t bother with highlighting most of them; maybe people just don’t expect anything deep from Spielberg. This time he isn’t trying to entertain or compel us; he’s being true to the Kubrick spirit and provoking us with a movie that may be just as problematic as A Clockwork Orange but has ten times more heart, kick, and intelligence.
Just as the marvelous Memento reinterpreted the film noir and the giddy Moulin Rouge gave us a new way of feeling musicals, A.I. has reworked the fairytale formula and fed it back into science fiction. As shadeless as David’s emotions are, the movie gets in between the dull black-and-white of the genre and comes up with bewildering moods. This is a fairytale for grown-ups, or maybe one for a more skeptical society; hints of tantalizing, pretty resolutions are intact but, even though it sometimes goes so far out you think it will never be able to swim back in (showing the actual Blue Fairy was incredibly daring, I thought), the sorrow is there too. Spielberg doesn’t give you the distance Kubrick gave his viewers, the distance audiences crave. The stunning production design and visual effects make this new world so real to us that we are immediately pulled in but not necessarily amazed. The world is familiar to us; Spielberg keeps on incorporating images suggestive of 2001, Dr. Strangelove, Close Encounters, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
At one point he evokes E.T. when a huge artificial moon floats higher and higher in the night sky and is revealed as the vehicle of a violent party searching for offensive stray robots. Spielberg gives us the elation his fairytale image conjures up, then the disappointing reality of it. Maybe it’s cynicism or embarrassment, but Spielberg, who is now 54, takes on a world-weary tone and explores it. As sad as it is to say this, he’s grown up. At the end of the movie, after both David and his mother have dozed off, Teddy is the last remaining character, the last representative of mankind. It’s fitting that this looney, likable, and disturbingly advanced childhood toy should come to be emblematic for both the hopes and dreams of humans as well as the destruction of an entire species. It takes age and experience for someone to look at the fancies of youth with the kind of respect and sadness that Spielberg gives this movie.
By Andrew Chan [JULY 20, 2001]