Steven Spielberg's A.I. is neither the worst nor the best movie he has ever made, but it is certainly the strangest. Our initial tendency is to attribute this to the involvement of Stanley Kubrick, who collaborated with Spielberg on the project for many years (though when he was given complete control after Kubrick's death, Spielberg rewrote the entire script and directed it on his own). But I think the strangeness comes from somewhere else: specifically, from deep inside Steven Spielberg. A.I. is a much more disturbing movie than anything this silly has a right to be, and I think that's because Spielberg has used it--unwittingly, I suspect--to reveal the darkest corners of his own unconscious. The unconscious is a notoriously disorganized place, and its unacknowledged influence may explain why the movie finally comes across as such a mess.
The plot, as perhaps everybody knows by now, involves a little boy whois really a robot. The Pinocchio overtones are made explicit in the movie, andimplicit in them is a kind of veiled competition between the upstart Dreamworksand the aging old Disney studio (which, in case you've forgotten, made thememorable animated feature about the little wooden puppet who wanted to be a"real boy"). Other old movies are also invoked, particularly The Wizard ofOz, though this time the wizard is played by a creature called Dr. Know, who looks like a cross between Albert Einstein and Steven Spielberg. I detected allusions to earlier Spielberg movies as well--E.T., of course, but also TheColor Purple, Amistad, and, most weirdly, Schindler's List. For the robots in this movie are a persecuted minority--a helpless, gentle, respectable group who are viewed as an inferior species by the humans and are publicly destroyed for the human mob's pleasure. The horrific scene in which this destruction is shown draws on exactly the same kind of brutality Spielberg lodged in the Ralph Fiennes character in Schindler.
What, exactly, are we to make of this analogy? That the Jews were, likeA.I.'s robots, a subspecies created by the Germans for their own practical purposes? Or conversely, that anything that looks and acts human must be human, so we put ourselves in moral jeopardy if we fail to perceive its innate rights? But movie characters played by live actors look and act human; we may even be fooled into having real emotions about them. (A lot is made in A.I. about the capacity to feel love, and the theme is handled with all the rigor and subtlety we have come to expect from Hollywood.) Does this mean we have to believe that these blatantly fictional figures are human? Do we really rank manufactured objects alongside verifiable Homo sapiens, with the same rights and duties owed to both?
Sarcasm is the natural response to a movie like this--and yet A.I. gets to you at a level that makes sarcasm seem churlish and defensive. We long for little David (played by Haley Joel Osment with his usual otherworldly precocity) to become a real boy and to win the unambivalent devotion of his mother. But even as we capitulate to the longing, we remain fully aware of the movie's creepiness. The mother (Frances O'Connor, in a thankless role) is so strangely intense a love object in this movie that it's almost surprising that A.I. didn't receive an NC-17 rating. At the movie's conclusion, David (resuscitated by kindly visiting aliens 2,000 years after the end of humanity--and no, you don't want to hear the details) gets his wish in the form of a single day spent with his mother, during which he and he alone fulfills her every need. He wakes her up with a kiss and puts her to bed at night, and actually comments on how glad he is that her husband and her flesh-and-blood son are both long gone. This is the kind of thing that real boys say when they are about two or three years old; but to see the fantasy enacted in full Spielbergian regalia--to see it treated as a reasonable wish--is almost unbelievably bizarre.
The only unmitigatedly good thing about A.I. is the performance turned in by Jude Law. Despite the fact that he too is playing a mechanical object (a sex robot called Gigolo Joe), he is the most vital thing about the movie. He must have ad-libbed some of his lines, because they have a witty sparkle utterly lacking in the rest of the script; as for the way he moves, it has a grace and sprightliness rarely seen on screen since Ray Bolger played the Scarecrow. It is not just that Jude Law is more beautiful than anyone else who ever appears with him (though he is that, to be sure); it's that he seems so much more alive than anyone else. Remember his marvelous scene as Dickie Greenleaf in TheTalented Mr. Ripley, when he was singing and banjo-strumming in a French nightclub alongside Matt Damon's lumpish Tom Ripley? Picture that, and you'll get some idea of how he looks next to all the robotic performances in A.I.
Actor performances are the main reason to go see the new Frank Ozmovie, The Score. It's a skillfully executed but basically hackneyed heist story involving a priceless object stored in the Montreal Customs House that needs to be liberated by a gang of technologically expert thieves. This would have no interest whatsoever if the gang did not include Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, and Marlon Brando.
Like everyone else, I am tired of watching Brando phone in ridiculousperformances. This one is something else. He first appears in a white suit andfedora, looking like a cross between Sydney Greenstreet and Truman Capote, and hecamps it up from then on. Yet his scenes with De Niro (which are practically allthe scenes he has) have a gentleness, a wry humor, a sense of the real pleasureof acting, that I haven't seen from him in a long time. Brando reportedly bannedFrank Oz from the set on the days he was being filmed, so the director had to useDe Niro as his surrogate, and you can feel this: There is an intimacy, aback-and-forth awareness between the two great actors that is impossible to fake.There are also moments when Brando is clearly improvising (De Niro first lookssurprised, then cautiously amused) and this interaction also is a joy to watch.These guys are having fun with their roles, and they bring us into the fun withthem.
The highest praise I can give to Edward Norton is to say that he holds his ownin this company. He does so with more tricks than the older actors use (his partincludes a subrole as a quivering, pathetic, feebleminded character), but he usesthem in a manner that finally works. And he allows himself to be the butt of themovie, so that we can enjoy the sight of the other two triumphing over him. It'sa generous performance and a very entertaining one.
A friend of mine describes movies like The Score as being "like good television," which he means disparagingly. But in this season of reruns, trashy reality shows, and smirking HBO series, good TV is hard to find at home. We should be grateful when it's offered to us in the theaters.
