|
I found this interesting, particularly the business about juxtaposing the Kubrick and Spielberg attitudes toward humanity, and the Pinocchio issues:
http://www.newyorker.com/THE_CRITICS/THE_CURRENT_CINEMA/
FACE/OFF
Steven Spielberg meets Stanley Kubrick.
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2001-07-02
Posted 2001-06-25
Early in Steven Spielberg's "A.I.," the face of a perfectly normal-looking woman slowly lifts off, moving outward from her head like the hatch of a spaceship. A minute later, the face falls back into place, and the creature—a robot, with clockwork brains—looks like a fleshy woman once again. We've seen face-lifts like this before, but it's still a shock—initially almost a mutilation, and then, once we've recovered, a sight as strange and beautiful as a painting by Magritte or Dali. In "A.I.," the many uncanny exchanges between the human and the post-human are brought off with seamless perfection, and Spielberg's imagery (Janusz Kaminski did the cinematography) is precise and unforced and at times hauntingly lovely. Spielberg still moves people through space better than anyone else; he uses blinding white light against dark backgrounds like a magician bringing revelation itself; he creates eccentric, mysteriously sad visual motifs—for instance, a robot abandoned at the bottom of a swimming pool, as forlorn as a party hat left on a subway bench. As a director of fantasy, Spielberg puts to shame the hacks who turn out foul-looking messes like "The Mummy Returns" and "Tomb Raider," with their ugly brown sets built to be blown up, their creatures that fall apart like weak piñatas. Whatever is wrong with "A.I."—and a great deal is wrong—it's the first American movie of the year made by an artist.
"A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" is set in a doom-ridden future: global warming has melted the polar ice cap; coastal cities, including New York, have gurgled and gone under; millions are dead, and a reduced worldwide population depends, with increasing disgust, on robots for work and pleasure. The idea for the movie has been around a long time—maybe too long. "A.I." is based on a Brian Aldiss story that was published in Harper's Bazaar in 1969 and was later worked into a screen story by Ian Watson. For years, Stanley Kubrick, in his lordly-dithering way, labored and fussed over the material. In the end, he turned to "Eyes Wide Shut," but not before talking at length to Spielberg about "A.I." and suggesting that he direct it. In the generally cynical environment of big-time Hollywood, Spielberg's assumption of the project after Kubrick's death has a stirring resonance to it, and I wish I could say that the semi-posthumous collaboration comes off. Of course, one can't be absolutely sure who is responsible for what, but if you were wondering how Spielberg's pop exaltations would consort with Kubrick's dread and metaphysical dismay, the answer is: strangely, confusingly.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" both opened with a bang, but this time Spielberg, who wrote the script himself, begins with a lugubrious double introduction. Ben Kingsley, offscreen, intones news of the ice-cap disaster in Noble English—the orotund diction of bad movies for more than half a century. Then there's a stiffly written and played science seminar led by William Hurt, a gray man standing among gray listeners. Hurt says something about the need for a new robot, a robot that can be imprinted with a desire to love and dream. Stepping out of a column of light like E.T., Haley Joel Osment is the paragon—a child robot called David, a boy who never throws food, or pees on the toilet seat, or squashes bugs. Haley Joel, the extraordinary young actor from "The Sixth Sense," is given a slightly plasticized look by the makeup artists—his cheeks are rounded and shiny, his complexion is peachy. He stands very still and holds an unblinking stare and a small, expectant smile. "Would you like me to go to bed now?" he asks. Programmed to love, his David is terribly sweet, and yet his adoptive parents, Monica (Frances O'Connor) and Henry Swinton (Sam Robards), are unnerved by him—especially after their real son, Martin, who has been cryogenically preserved while a cure was sought for a disease that he contracted, suddenly recovers and comes home. Jealous and vindictive, Martin, a human devil-child, tries to destroy David, and Spielberg works up some horror-film tension. But these sequences aren't very enjoyable. As a couple, the Swintons are intentionally unappealing—Monica, in particular, is wild-eyed and neurotic, a lousy mother to both boys. The Swintons' house is a futuristic art thing, circular, with tiny mobiles hanging everywhere, and Spielberg and Kaminski, in a rare mistake, light it in diffused pale-blue tones that put one into a trance of boredom.
Scared of David, Monica turns him loose in the forest. At that point, the movie should take off as a fairy tale about an unwanted child. David, now an outcast, falls among the robots, including Joe (Jude Law), a stud-gigolo who makes love to lonely women. Jude Law's hair is shaped into a black plastic wedge, and his cheekbones and chin are molded for glamour; he's more beautiful than any human, that's for sure. Frisky in a high-gloss black coat, he dances his way through the part, a candid and utterly charming machine. When Law is around, the movie is magical. But there's a darker purpose afoot: the robots are all outcasts. The humans hate them and persecute them as thoroughly as the Nazis persecuted the Jews, rounding them up and bashing them at obscene revels called Flesh Fairs. Spielberg stages one of these events as a cross between a rock concert gone mad and a freaky W.W.F. brawl; the assembled crowd, roaring and cursing, seems like a fascist mob.
One senses a perverse Kubrickian joke here: the humans are neurotic, frantic, and empty, the machines refined and good-natured. And Spielberg fills out the joke: politely, without jostling, the robots search through a junk pile, picking up a spare chin or a set of teeth or an arm. The scene is grotesque yet gentle, in beatific-surreal style. At the Flesh Fair, the distinguished robots go to their deaths with smiles of resignation. All this is haunting, but what does it mean? What's the point of the anti-populism embodied in the portrait of the human mob? We're meant to be outraged by the cruelty, yet is it crazy for humans to feel threatened by the machines that are literally replacing them? What's being satirized or criticized—human fear? The inferiority of the humans is a dead-end irony that doesn't work dramatically. One suspects that it's merely the latest aspect of Kubrick's misanthropy, which took over his movies as early as "2001: A Space Odyssey." In that film, the computer HAL was far more human than the humans. For thirty years, in such zombified works as "Barry Lyndon" and "Eyes Wide Shut," Kubrick had little use for men and women. Operating from the far side of the grave in "A.I.," he's running his own kind of Flesh Fair.
Spielberg, of course, has the opposite temperament: he likes warmth and sentiment in his pictures. In the past, children have been the perfect vehicle for his emotion, but in "A.I.," with a brilliant child actor on hand, he loses his common sense and milks the kid to death. David just loves that awful mother and through all his adventures longs to be a real little boy so she will love him back. The story is based explicitly on "Pinocchio," but it gives us a queasy feeling from the beginning. Have the filmmakers forgotten that Pinocchio is a scamp? He's disobedient and lazy, he lies, he has a nose that rather famously gets longer. Pinocchio wants to be a real person because he's tired of being knocked around as a puppet. He is redeemed by love for his wood-carver "father" just at the very end of the tale. But in "A.I." David is not only the ultimate goody-goody; he's the spirit of pure, yearning adoration. That's his sole dimension—he's a robot—and in the end Haley Joel, great as he is, tries our patience. The movie weirdly pours treacle over a foundation of despair, and any genuine emotion drops out of it.
"A.I." might have worked if it had been faster and lighter, with perhaps only glancing moments of misery. But this is a ponderous, death-of-the-world fantasy, which leaves us with nothing but an Oedipal robot—hardly a redemption. At the end, still awaiting his transformation, David winds up underwater in drowned New York. Eventually, some willowy extraterrestrials show up, and we hear Ben Kingsley completing the orotund explanations of the opening scene. The bluish imagery attains a religioso quality, yet no humans are left to greet the future. That Kubrick gave up on the human race will not come as a surprise, but Spielberg is a different story. "A.I." has every kind of special effect in it but this one: a deceased director rises from the crypt and drains the vitality out of a living one.
Peace.
~ ~ ~
All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha
|\_/|
='_'=
Every hundred years, all new people
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
Pass The Popcorn 
) ...here it goes: 
