On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Artificial Emotions By Raphael Shargel BILLED AS having been co-produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin studios and Stanley Kubrick, A.I. will be the last new work to feature...
...Much of his work was difficult to watch, dwelling on aspects of human psychology most of us prefer to ignore...
...Indeed, they, unlike David, manifest a broad spectrum of desires during the course of the film...
...In the end, Spielberg resembles a ham actor manipulating his fans' sympathy and cultivating their tears...
...is an example...
...Some of the film's troubles are more fundamental...
...They worked on a treatment together, then Kubrick grew increasingly attached to the story and resolved to make it himself following Eyes Wide Shut, which turned out to be his final production...
...But I see it as emblematic of a longstanding struggle within Spielberg's own esthetic desires...
...He bathes most of his scenes in gauzy white light, desaturating the color so that the audience is forced to view the production design as if through scrim...
...When a prototype is completed, Hobby selects Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances ?'Connor) as its adoptive parents...
...Viciously jealous, he does everything in his devious power to set his parents against the intruder...
...Reeling in ecstasy, he climbs into her bed and, so enwombed, retreats, according to Ben Kingsley's obscure narration, to that "place where dreams are born...
...For another, David is supposed to be the first mecha with the potential for autonomous thinking, but his companions also seem to display this ability...
...Although A.I.'s farreaching vision is impressive, Spielberg is not content merely to narrate a good story...
...since its elite have built the enormous Rouge City...
...If David were human, he would have been diagnosed (by the audience as well as his psychoanalyst) as an obsessive and stuffed with antianxiety medication...
...Finally, David doesn't know how to make a cup of coffee until he sees Monica at the kettle (an improbable device in a futuristic kitchen), but in a moment of crisis, he jumps into a police helicopter and pilots it to safety...
...In fact, the orga are all so callous and selfish that the movie conveys a deep cynicism about the very humanity David is meant to simulate...
...Transported to a fantasy replica of the Swinton home void of both father and brother, he pampers his doting mother until bedtime, when she finally says "I love you...
...When David puts this request to Hobby, the professor tells him he is as real as any mecha he has designed, suggesting that answer ought to be satisfactory...
...Rather, Hobby enthusiastically plans a whole line of Davids (and Darleens) for sale to needy parents—even though these synthetic children will not grow or ever think for themselves...
...In an early scene one of his subordinates asks whether human masters will be responsible for loving the automatons who are programmed to submit to them, asserting that this is a "moral question...
...It is reported that when Kubrick spoke of his project, he referred to it as "Pinocchio...
...At one point in the mid-' 90s, after admiring the animated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, he entertained the idea of turning the project over to Spielberg...
...John Williams, whose scores served Spielberg well in his early career, long ago enteredmusical senility...
...Henry's central argument for getting rid of him derives from his assumption that if David knows how to love, he must understand hatred...
...Don't we admire loyal lovers because they always have the option of turning away their attention and choose not to...
...The plot is similarly full of holes that undermine its seriousness...
...The film is unconscionably sloppy...
...Martin, of course, continues to fear his rival...
...In an unspecified future, a series of ecological disasters has devastated the earth...
...in theaters today, but he rejected Kubrick's ambition to fashion a new technology for the film...
...There a mishap traps him underwater...
...The polar caps have melted and the oceans have overflowed, displacing millions and starving many more...
...When Monica introduces David to Martin's cast-off plaything, Teddy's first line is "I am not a toy...
...One is Rouge City, a pleasure park for adult orga that appears to have been modeled after the KorovaMilkbar in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange...
...Forbidden to bear another child, a grieving Monica agrees to activate the love program in the robot Hobby has named David (Haley Joel Osment...
...Isn't love beautiful in human beings, even in children, because it has to be continually renewed...
...These hospital tones can mask flaws in the background and compensate for unevenly framed shots, but they are an insult to the memory of Kubrick, who specialized in vivid light and color...
...Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's idea of esthetic virtuosity is to change film stock...
...Given what we have learned about the robot's selflessness, this seems unlikely, yet Henry does not bother to ask Hobby to confirm his opinion...
...A.I.'s soundtrack reduces the complex emotions inherent in the script and the acting to distractingly maudlin timbres...
...He was also an uncompromising perfectionist, taking months—sometimes more than a year—just to complete shooting...
...Law's performance is the film's second tour de force...
...Teddy then pulls out a lock of her hair that David cut over two millennia ago...
...Because we know his boasts of sexual conquests are not the words of a puffed up libertine but of a program that narrates experience, Joe's persona is at once funny and poignant...
...The simplest solution would be for Henry and Martin to activate David's love program...
...Kubrick did toil for years on a related project that drew its inspiration from a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss entitled "Supertoys Last All Summer Long...
...Another is a futuristic Manhattan whose tallest skyscrapers, towering above the floods that drowned the city, are its only inhabitable spaces...
...After he twice goads David into situations that put both of their lives at risk, the virtual child is exiled from the house and the mother he adores...
...At the end the supermecha tell David they could clone Monica if they had a sample of her DNA...
...His usual company of creative teammates rifle the leftovers of their tired bags of tricks...
...It is difficult to imagine two more dissimilar directors than these would-be collaborators...
...His mecha moves with an impassive ease that is clearly not human, even though its face can suffer and its body yearn...
...David falls into a violent frenzy in this scene, but Hobby does not recognize that his prodigy has become depressed to the point of being suicidal...
...After the separation from Monica, David becomes determined, like Pinocchio in Martin's storybook, to find the Blue Fairy and ask her to transform him into a real live boy so that he may be worthy of his mother...
...Though a real help to his friend his mind never strays far from his primary function...
...and since even the lower classes can afford to destroy expensive machines, the restrictions on childbearing for the sake of preserving resources do not make much sense...
...David must wait centuries for such fulfillment because his creator does not really understand the soul he has designed...
...But he never completed a shooting script...
...But in a world where no organic being seems capable of any feeling nobler than lust, fear, anger, or jealousy, it is not clear what they think the term means...
...The great director died more than two years ago...
...By contrast, on their joumeys David, Joe and Teddy encounter several magnificent mecha, including a repository of knowledge named Dr...
...In a sequence vaguely reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, he wanders through a wood with a mecha teddy bear(voiced by Jack Angel) and, following a harrowing adventure, befriends Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who is programmed to perform sexual favors for lonely orga women...
...it is the product of a popular entertainer who is not a consummate artist...
...He claims this experiment in programming might enable mecha to develop inner lives andmotivations of their own...
...his only companions are other machines...
...It is only because David's programming compels him to seek out his mother at all costs that we feel sympathy for him...
...If you appreciate pulp, you will find much to savor...
...Know—who looks and talks like a Chuck Jones animation of Albert Einstein—and a statuesque giver of wishes...
...Not in Spielberg's cosmos...
...But it could have been a good deal more than it is if Spielberg had devoted half as much thought to the "moral questions" he raises as he did to the false sentiment of his sticky cheap ending...
...Despite all of its shortcomings, A.I...
...Hobby never explains why any parent would want to embrace such restricted creatures...
...In a world that is supposed to be in an environmental crisis, people are awfully wasteful...
...Their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is suffering from a severe illness and has been frozen...
...The social elite support the proliferation of mecha, but some of the disenfranchised, worried that they will be replaced, hate and fear the androids...
...They are manipulative, commercially savvy and ultimately reassuring...
...He violated traditional ideas of narrative...
...When the biological son re-enters the household, he sparks sibling rivalry in a series of superbly executed scenes...
...Osment's performance is astonishing...
...It is not clear why Hobby considers David's desire to be worthy of his mother as markedly different from the relatively individualistic thinking of his robotic friends...
...A.I.'s deepest flaw cuts through its core...
...Since this society has apparently mastered perpetual motion...
...For one, why shouldn't David be able to cathect more than one person...
...Spielberg's most successful movies are geared toward juvenile audiences...
...In the final sequence, when the supermecha create a clone of Monica that can live for only one day, David becomes the dream patient of every Freudian analyst...
...It is still soft and fluffy...
...Nor does he appear to remember that David has proven a danger to his adopted mother and brother, that the family disposed of him not because his program failed but because they feared its consequences...
...Here, as in the past, the director proves he is not a sufficiently disciplined craftsman to realize his sober intentions...
...In this instance, a worthwhile film about the persistence of love and the cruelty of modern technology is choked by a stronger appeal to the raw emotion of a climactic moment...
...As an homage to his mentor, Spielberg wrote and directed the version of A.I...
...Kubrick, by contrast, maintained a tragic vision...
...Joe's last words, when carried off by authorities who will falsely charge him with murder, are "I am...
...That is, until Martin unexpectedly recovers...
...Voiced by Robin Williams and Meryl Streep, they speak with a warmth and wisdom absent in the human figures who populate this world...
...He too has been constructed to love, but his erotic sensibility is comically divergent from David's tender feelings...
...David is now forced into a universe that treats him as an object...
...The movie begins with Professor Alan Hobby (William Hurt) startling his associates by proposing that the Cybertonics corporation construct a childlike automaton capable of loving its owner the way a real youngster loves its parents...
...To compensate for the paucity of humans (referred to as "orga," meaning organic beings), scientists have created lifelike robots (called "mecha," mechanical creatures) who can fulfill the needs and satisfy the desires of the survivors...
...will be the last new work to feature Kubrick's name in the credits...
...However traumatic their middle sections might be, they feature earnest heroes who never suffer without reward...
...Spielberg's recent films bear signs of having been planned and shot in haste...
...whether or not he was one of the film's creators is at the very least a moot question...
...Williams' main theme sounds like a New Age version of a Gregorian chant whined by a castrato...
...For the first time in two decades, Spielberg returns to the middle-class suburban restlessness that grounded fantasies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist...
...I was...
...Characters speak the word "love" in hushed tones, as if they were at prayer...
...Critics who have noted the divided nature of the film have called it a tussle between Kubrick and Spielberg...
...While David is yet another in a long line of ingenuous Spielberg protagonists, he registers a hapless innocence that demands our compassion...
...As soon as he begins calling Monica "Mommy," she perks up and the Swinton family is happily restored...
...Martin cannot quite decide whether David is a toy or a brother...
...Even Hobby, who wrote the love program, has no words to explain it...
...in 2001, the year that is the title of Kubrick's legendary 1968 sci-fi Odyssey...
...remains a provocative piece of work...
...Hobby replies with Satanic bluster, stating that God created Adam with the expectation that he would love him in return...
...The government has restricted childbearing in order to preserve important natural resources...
...He awakes 2,000 years later to an earth where humans have become extinct and the only remaining sentient creatures are super-robots who attempt at last to grant his wishes...
...The film's portentous style and heavyhanded speeches try to convince us we are in the presence of greatness...
...Spielberg's main tribute, in fact, is that he released A.I...
...David's travels take him through a series of astounding set pieces...
...In a film full of religious imagery (beginning with the angelic statue that stands outside Hobby's office), Spielberg, again true to form, sends his characters on the road to redemption without requiring them to put faith in anything less concrete than science...
...The film, whose title is an abbreviation for "Artificial Intelligence," has a captivating premise...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
