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A.I.
5/10
aka
A.I. Artifical Intelligence : USA 2001
director
: Steven Spielberg
script : Spielberg, based on a screen story by Ian Watson, from short
story ‘Super-toys Last All Summer Long’ by Brian Aldiss
producers include : Spielberg
cinematography : Janusz Kaminski
editing : Michael Kahn
music : John Williams
lead actors : Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, William Hurt
145 minutes
this
is the full-length review… for a short summary, click here
Artifical
sunlight was growing long and golden across the lawn – and David and Teddy
were staring through the window at them.
Seeing their faces, Henry and his wife grew serious.
“What do we do about them?”
“Teddy’s no trouble. He works well.”
Brian Aldiss, ‘Super-Toys Last All Summer Long’
First
things first : AI isn’t much good. It’s shamelessly sentimental,
manipulative, pretentious, portentous and ponderous. But, let’s not forget,
we’re talking Spielberg here, and surely these things go with the territory
- the realm of woolly saccharine. It’s bad enough when he restricts himself
to directing, but here he’s also written the script, officially his first
since Close Encounters, way back when. A degree of rustiness is,
of course, understandable – as when George Lucas thought it would be a
jolly idea to have a 20-year break between Star Wars and Phantom
Menace.
But
when moviemakers become this rich, powerful and ‘respected,’ nobody dares
point out where they’re going wrong, and audiences have to sit through
the stodgy consequences. In the case of AI, there’s also the shadowy
presence of Stanley Kubrick to contend with, causing Spielberg even more
constipation than usual. Even so, the film isn’t a total disaster – and
how ironic that the most identifiably Spielbergian element turns out to
be its one trump-card saving grace. But more of that later.
Brian
Aldiss’s short story is just that: short - barely six or seven pages.
He’s stretched it way beyond feature length, adding in many more new scenes,
but Spielberg hasn’t expanded the themes or characters in any proportional
way. The people remain in their original small scale, and the plot development
is sketchy at best: in an unspecified future, robot boy David (Osment)
is “adopted” by Monica (O’Connor) and Henry (Sam Robards), a couple whose
own son Martin (Jake Thomas) lies in suspended animation, virtually dead.
But
when Martin makes a miraculous recovery, David ends up abandoned in the
woods with only his robotic toy bear Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel) for
company. Having read ‘Pinocchio’, David becomes obsessed with the idea
of becoming a ‘real’ boy, who could then regain Monica’s love. He sets
off in search of the magical ‘Blue Fairy’ from the story, aided by lover-robot
Gigolo Joe (Law). The road leads to David’s ‘maker,’ Professor Hobby (Hurt),
and then, via a series of bizarre events, into the distant future, where
David’s dreams are finally realised…
If
you can bring yourself to overlook Spielberg’s limitations as writer-director,
and his countless basic mistakes (endless muzak; banal dialogue; hazy
visuals; plot holes, etc), A.I. is surprisingly watchable. It doesn’t
feel like an unusually long movie, though it surely wouldn’t have killed
Spielberg to aim for a two-hour maximum. Some of the visuals are undeniably
impressive, especially the underwater sections – though nothing in the
‘ruined Manhattan’ sequences matches similar images in Final
Fantasy – and there’s a freewheeling loopiness about the final
half-hour that’s engaging enough, if you don’t think too long or hard
about what’s happening.
But
A.I. makes the fatal error of wanting to be taken seriously. It
has themes and explores morals and philosophy – or
at least it thinks it does. As soon as you try to analyse anything about
the picture, it immediately falls apart. Let’s just say we’re only nominally
in the realm of Philip K Dick. Nothing makes much sense, and hardly anything
works – Gigolo Joe must be one of the most sloppily written characters
in a major movie this year (did Spielberg just forget about the murder
sub-plot?) and it doesn’t help that a little bit of Jude Law’s audition-piece
performance goes a very long way.
There
are many awful sequences – anything involving Prof Hobby is irritating,
even the way the closing credits bill him as ‘The Visionary,’ though he’s
never described as such in the film. There’s a nonsensical ‘Flesh Fair’
in which robots are destroyed in front of a baying redneck crowd while
an anachronistic nu-metal band rocks out on stage – all very sub-John
Carpenter, but at least Spielberg acknowledges as much setting it in ‘Haddonfield,’
Halloween’s fictional small-town. The ending is also pretty hard
to stomach, and, like the opening, it’s dominated by a largely redundant
voiceover – as in Chocolat,
the film tries to get away with all sorts by explicitly presenting itself
as a fairy tale.
It
doesn’t work. In fact, only one thing in the whole film does, but it’s
enough – amazingly - to make the whole thing just about worthwhile. One
could say that Teddy steals the film. But that wouldn’t be fair. Teddy
saves the film. He arguably is the film. One reviewer has
described him as ‘the hero of A.I.’. Another suggested he should
get the Best Supporting Actor award, or at the very least a sequel of
his own. It’s very hard to disagree with any of these sentiments. He’s
an absolute delight to watch. When Teddy is on screen, you’d be forgiven
for thinking A.I. is a marvellous. When he’s not, you remember
how rubbish it really is. This, surely, is the definition of a great performance
– let’s divide that Oscar between veteran voice-artist Jack Angel and
animatronics genius Stan Winston.
It’s
like Chewbacca in the Star Wars pictures – surrounded by ciphers
and non-entities, this supposedly secondary figure stands out as by far
the most sympathetic, expressive and coherent figure on screen. Everybody
else rambles on repetitively, spouting Spielbergian nonsense – they sound
lobotomised. Teddy’s comments are brief, gruff and to the point – he sounds
human, sensible, real. Everybody else is either rooted to the spot or
moves with agonising slowness. Teddy is always on the go, often running
as fast as his little legs will allow. He’s the one injection of pep and
life into a film that’s otherwise a trudge through treacle. Yes, he’s
the most Spielbergy thing in the film, designed with ‘tie-in’ potential
in mind. But he isn’t a gratuitous add on - he also serves a simple but
eminently sensible thematic function, in that he’s the way David defines
his own (relative) status as “real.”
And
Teddy brings out the best in Spielberg the director, suggesting that the
main problem is a mismatch between director and (Kubrickian) subject matter.
The film is full of aggressively epic visuals, but the single most remarkable
shot is when we see David lying at the bottom of his parents’ swimming
pool, and the camera pulls back and back, until finally we briefly see
Teddy amble into shot and look down into the water. Later, David cuts
off a lock of Monica’s hair as she sleeps, and Spielberg cuts to a perspective
above Teddy’s head as the toy watches the lock fall to the floor.
These
are genuinely magical moments – and so is the very last shot, in which
Teddy again is used subtly, movingly, wittily, with a lightness of touch
that’s otherwise so sorely lacking. Time and again Teddy points up the
rest of A.I.’s deficiencies, but he also goes a very long way to
compensating for them. To say - like Henry Swinton - that he ‘works well,’
would be the understatement of the year.
20th
September, 2001 (seen Sep-19-01, UGC Middlesbrough)
For an interview
with AI star Jack Angel click here
by Neil
Young
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