I have a real penchant for films that just don’t quite work. This is different from enjoying films that are just terrible for their sheer campiness (i.e., Chronicles of Riddick). Rather, in these cases I think films become interesting because the scope of their ambition is so massive that even in failed execution they have something to offer, either in light of the films they could have been, or in terms of what they teach about the craft of story telling.
Stephen Spielberg’s film A.I. is not just one such film to me, but perhaps one of the finest examples out there of a “fabulously flawed film.’ I know some of you will be shaking your heads already, either because you saw A.I. and the film made you angry or frustrated (I have had more arguments about A.I. with people than any other film ever) or just because you read the bad reviews. I actually saw A.I. twice in its opening weekend (and own the DVD) because it is such a complicated, cruel, peculiar and brilliant mess of a film. Divided into three sections, it is really three short films with radically different moods and messages.
In A.I.’s first section a prototype of a robot boy is adopted by a family. This section is the most like Stanley Kubrick’s work (Kubrick, in case you didn’t know, dreamed of making A.I. for over 20 years before talking to Spielberg about working on it. The project was finally handed over to Spielberg in its entirety after Kubrick’s death) in that it is slow and stark and horror comes in the sudden and infrequent bursts of actual emotion from the characters. This first section ends with the robot boy being abandoned in the woods, as his family is no longer comfortable with him, but his adoptive mother is unwilling to take him to be destroyed.
This scene is one of the most agonizing things I’ve ever watched, and may be the number one reason not to expose children to this film. Sure, A.I. rated PG-13, but the scene is so awful and shocking (and so exceptionally well done), I’d argue that any minor, anyone still truly dependent on their parents in any way, is going to have an extraordinarily visceral response to the moment. The scene, which focuses on the robot boy bargaining to be allowed to stay with the family – “I’ll be good, I’ll do anything you want”, will also evoke for many strains of broken relationships of many varieties.
It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, but it’s just awful and provides us with the first peculiar glimmering that there’s something much more to Spielberg as a director than the idealization of childhood. Here Spielberg gives us not just childhood as a horror, but children themselves.
A.I.’s second section brings us the unexpected, and I think perhaps unintentional heart, of Spielberg’s film. Gigolo Joe, played by Jude Law with humorous, kind and yet smarmy affection, is absolutely incandescent. With little dances and rhymes and a perpetual need to seduce, Joe is the only character in the film who displays empathy. The humans don’t – they hate the mechas (robots) and fear them, the robot boy doesn’t – he is just greedy for love and feels anger towards everything else that doesn’t fit in to his goal of getting his lost mother’s love.
Joe, programmed as a love toy for women (why anyone would bother to make a purely heterosexual sex robot, I don’t exactly understand, but that’s a digression for another day), clearly got some empathy in there, and becomes the robot boy’s caretaker while also becoming a fugitive from a murder he didn’t commit. This second section of the film is the most visually stunning of A.I., and also the most in touch with our current society’s demons – it’s all about sex, violence and rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s done brilliantly. Also, film buffs note the tribute to Absolute Beginners in one of Joe’s early scenes.
In A.I.’s third section, Joe and the robot boy reach “the drowned city at the end of the world where the lions weep.” This drowned Manhattan is spectacular and eerie for the language used to describe it before we even see it, and once we arrive at it we are breathless for its beauty. This section of the film is remarkably deceptive in many ways and it is here that Spielberg takes the most risks and fails the most spectacularly. Among the grave mistakes here is a conclusion that shows us the far future from the time of A.I. – and when we meet this future’s mechas, they look far too typically like the aliens Spielberg has graced us with the past.
They are not aliens, at least in an extra-terrestrial sense, but they are aliens in the sense that humans have died and the world is made up only of strangers descended from that which was once created by man. Spielberg’s science also gets murky here too – on everything from the nature of an ice age to the internal logic of his mechanized world. Perhaps most problematic for viewers, however, is the appearance of a happy ending (the robot boy gets his mother back).
Perhaps if the director were anyone but Spielberg, audience would be able to see this moment for what it is, but so used to his saccharine endings, they are suspicious. Spielberg, however, is a deft filmmaker here, and the happiness is illusory, and the characters being too naïve to see it are actors in a profound tragedy of misguided innocence.
No mater what you hoped it would be, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is probably not the film you want it to be. However its ideas are fascinating, and its design glorious. It also marks Spielberg’s transition into a darker, more adult filmmaker who can use science fiction themes not just to show us our hopes, but also our most primal fears.
Finally, with several excellent performances, the fascinating back story about Kubrick’s own ambitions with the film and featuring the last movie image of a ruined Manhattan featuring the World Trade Center, Spielberg’s A.I. is an accidental part of film history that may well be forgotten by popular audiences but will certainly be looked at in film schools for years to come for its craft, for its flaws and for its solid evidence of a director in transition.
