Is the unquiet specter of Stanley Kubrick
stalking the movie theaters of the land? As everyone knows by now, Steven
Spielberg's latest movie is based upon an unrealized project by the late
Kubrick. As an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar
(5/6/01) that appeared at the end of last spring explained, Kubrick had
proposed the project--adapted from a story by Brian Aldiss--as more suitable
to Spielberg. Preparations proceeded to the extent of Spielberg's installing a
fax terminal in his bedroom to receive instructions from the reclusive Kubrick,
but at the last minute the former backed off. By writing and directing A.I.,
has Spielberg now made good on his promise as the pious fulfillment of a debt?
Or is the film an attempt to exorcise the wraith of Stanley K?
In
a famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (April 16, 1851), written while he was
writing Moby-Dick, Herman Melville declared, "There is the grand truth about Nathaniel
Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder, but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."
In retrospect, it is quite obvious that Melville was engaging in projection:
Hawthorne was ambiguous, but not nihilistic, and the younger writer was in
effect asking the older admired one to give his blessing to Melville's
diabolical enterprise. (In another letter to Hawthorne [June 29, 1851],
Melville wrote "This is the book's motto (the secret one),--Ego non baptiso
te in nomine--but make out the rest yourself.")
Of
the two directors, Kubrick and Spielberg, no one could doubt which one of them
said "NO! in thunder". After E.T., it might have appeared that
Spielberg was headed in the direction of catering to the public's thirst for
maudlin sentimentality, but the same could not be said of the director of
Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. Nevertheless, an abyss separates the
grim portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust or those of the Normandy
invasion from the unremittingly bleak visions of Clockwork Orange or Full
Metal Jacket. Was Kubrick's bequest a de facto gesture of defiance? Was it a
way of saying, "See if you can turn this into sweetness and light by the
final reel!"
The difference is
blatant in the closing shots of Schindler's List
and Clockwork
Orange. The
former ends with the actual survivors whom Schindler had saved filing past his
grave--a powerfully affirmative vision that ranks with the heart-rending shot
at the end of Roberto Rosselini's Open City in which the children depart after
the execution of Don Pietro with the vista of Rome dominated by St. Peter's
facing them. But Clockwork Orange concludes with Alex's poisonously seductive
gaze directed at the audience before segueing into what I have always thought
was a reprise of a famous moment from Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or.
Behind gray footage of turbulent seas,
A.I.
commences on an emphatically apocalyptic note, with a narrator informing the
audience that as a result of the greenhouse effect the earth's oceans have
risen, destroying coastal cities, in what seems to be the fairly near future.
Because of the scarcity of resources, reproduction is strictly limited and the
human species has become dependent on robots--called Mechs in the film--that are bitterly feared and
resented by much of the human population. Maintaining the same austere range of
colors--the photography is by Janusz Kaminski--that will be employed throughout most of
A.I., the picture starts to
unfold its tale in the headquarters of a company that manufactures robots.
In a setting that faintly evokes the decor of a
Mad Scientist movie from the early 1930s updated to 2001, Professor
Hobby (William Hurt) provides an expository peroration to his colleagues about
recent developments in robot technology, and concludes with the surprising
announcement that it has finally been possible to construct a robot capable of
feeling love. This will be David, a permanently eleven-year child who is going
to replace Martin (Jake Thomas), the son lost by Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica
(Frances O'Connor) five
years before, whom they have put into a cryogenic state of suspended animation in hopes
that he can be restored to life one day by advances in medical science.
In
his perceptive critique of A.I. on The Hot Button, David Poland has complained
not unjustifiably that "the intellectual level of the conversation is
almost insultingly simplistic in view of the portentous tone that is brought to
the sequence." But this criticism raises the whole question of the film's
genre. Appearances notwithstanding, the scene is not supplying the motivation for a
science fiction vehicle, but the premise of a fairy tale, as everything that
happens subsequently makes clear. Stanley Kubrick may have intended A.I. to be
science fiction, but the completed work has more in common with the Romantic
fables of a Ludwig Tieck, an E.T.A Hofmann, or a Nathaniel Hawthorne than it
does with most certifiable science fiction narratives.
In
some of the Indiana Jones productions, Steven Spielberg went in for mythic
pretensions that I could not take any more seriously than I could the pseudo-mythopoiesis
of George Lucas' Star Wars sagas. On the other hand, Spielberg, with his uncanny sensitivity to the fears of childhood, has a talent for reproducing the
atmosphere of fairy tales beyond that of any other director working in the
American cinema today--even the scene in which Private Ryan's mother learns of
the death of her two sons seems closer to The Wizard of Oz than to any war
movie. In Spielberg's hands, even the undeniable horrors depicted in
Empire of the Sun, Schindler's
List, or Saving Private Ryan can seem like the remembered
fragments of some diabolical Märchen come true, recalling Stephen Dedalus' statement in James Joyce's
Ulysses that "History... is a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
The film falls into three
main sections. In the first, David comes to live with the Swinton's, but this
idyll is brutally interrupted by the unexpected return of Martin. The
"real" child, having no desire to share the affections of his
parents with a stranger--especially an artificially constructed one--contrives
to put David in the wrong. After it appears David has tried to kill Martin,
the Swinton's decide to return him to the laboratory, an action that would
amount to the boy's virtual annihilation. On the way to return him, however,
the highly equivocal Monica, suffering pangs of guilt, instead abandons him in
a woods and orders him never to attempt to return.
This
intense episode, with its echoes of the scene in Walt Disney's Snow White in
which the headsman abandons the girl in the forest, supplies a bridge to the
next and most effective section, which introduces a new character, Gigolo Joe.
Easily the most interesting of the dramatis personae in A.I., Joe, brilliantly
played by Jude Law, is a Mech who has been fabricated to sexually
satisfy the ladies, and who is himself the victim of a frame-up that makes it
appear he has killed one of his clients. Fleeing the scene of the crime, he
discovers David just before the latter is rounded up by a band of vengeful
humans intent upon destroying Mechs wholesale at an event called the Flesh
Fair that combines the most horrifying features of a barbaric carnival and a
Nazi party rally.
Echoes of the
Holocaust often crop up in Spielberg's later movies, but they are unmistakable
in this episode. Yet not only here but throughout the second part, the scenes
which compose it mark the highpoint of the film in every respect, in pacing,
in dramatic tension, and in atmosphere. Spielberg creates a suffocatingly
dystopian vision of the future gone amok which has few parallels in other movies--Fritz Lang's
Metropolis is among them--and which easily shows up
Ridley Scott's wretched Blade Runner as a glitzy piece of science fiction
kitsch, a Republican vision of the future as a bad acid trip. Were only the
remainder of A.I. as compelling as the best moments of the middle
section!
Once David and Joe escape
the Flesh Fair, they embark upon a quest in search of David's true identity, a
quest which leads them--by way of a somewhat prolix
question-and-answer-session with a sideshow cyber-clairvoyant named Dr.
Know--to David's creator, Professor Hobby. However, Hobby now reveals himself
not as the cool savant of the earlier scenes, but as a madman who has
obsessively fashioned a whole series of androids exactly resembling David in
the image of his own dead son. David flees from the pursuing authorities in a
vehicle that he crashes in the ruins of an amusement park buried underneath
the waters surrounding New York city.
Logically,
the film should have ended here, with David lying entombed in the vehicle and
longing to be resurrected one day as a human for as long as he endures
underwater. Today, any attempt to nail down some ineffable "essence"
of human being is likely to strike many observers as reeking of metaphysical
prestidigitation. However, neither does the reduction of what is human about
humans to purely behavioralist terms seem very satisfying. It is to the film's
credit that it does not try to fudge this question by simply obliterating the
difference, but rather insists upon it: human is human, a.i. is a.i., and the
twain shall never meet. David will remain a tragic figure--in the sense that the
Frankenstein monster is one--because of the impossibility of his ever becoming,
much less being human.
But the film tries
to fulfill David's desire as best it can in the final section, a coda that skips
ahead 2000 years into the future. (I do not like including spoilers in a review,
but it is difficult to discuss what seems to me the most dubious aspect of
A.I. without doing so.) David is discovered and revived by the latter day descendents of
the Mechs. The latter have the ability to bring deceased humans back to life,
but only for a twenty-four hour period. However, David insists upon their
reviving his mother, so that he can have once had the experience of being
loved by her.
What ensues is about the
most flagrantly Oedipal fantasy I have ever seen in any movie. David and
Monica spend their last day together in splendid isolation as if they were
pair of characters out of a Renaissance pastoral romance stranded on a desert
island. At the conclusion, they lie next to one another in bed, at last
vouchsafed the sleep of the blessed. Yet in spite of the film's obvious
intention, the last shots do not emanate a sense of tranquil repose for
eternity, but that of the cold immobility of a mausoleum--like the scenes of the
eighteenth century drawing room in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The final section that unnecessarily--and almost
painfully--prolongs the length of the film may entirely sink A.I.
for many viewers.
It
is noteworthy that the two most interesting new releases of the summer--Apocalypse Now Redux falling into a category of its
own--Moulin Rouge
and this film should be highly problematic, deeply flawed productions. But in
contrast to Moulin Rouge, which got largely favorable reviews, A.I. has taken
a lot of flak from critics, most conspicuously from David Denby in The New
Yorker, who used the movie as stick to assail Kubrick. Yet there are moments
when A.I. achieves something of the unmediated pathos of D.W. Griffith,
especially in Spielberg's uncanny feel for arcana of the nursery like
the talking teddy bear. A.I.
is ultimately dissatisfying, but it hardly
deserved the contumely that has been heaped on it in some quarters.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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