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Like, well, all of Steven Spielberg's films, A.I.
is stuffed to the gills with sacchariney melodrama meant to tug at all the requisite heartstrings and get us to contemplate "the bigger questions." Questions
like, what is the irreducible essence of humanity? Is
it the capacity to love and experience emotion? And if
we could transfer this capability to non-human,
synthetic forms, what are the moral and ethical
obligations we would have to our creations? These are
timely questions to be sure, especially considering
the accelerated evolution and sophistication of
"smart" technologies that have already radically
changed human life.
Such "bigger questions" might be found throughout Spielberg's work. From Close Encounters of the Third Kind, through the Indiana Jones series, The Color Purple, Schindler's List and Amistad he has, with varying degrees of success, meditated on issues like faith, life, and justice. And in general, I applaud this cinematic humanitarianism, even though it is more often than not a bit, shall we say, overbearing. Nonetheless, what is most distressing about A.I. is that it seems haphazardly cribbed together from Spielberg's previous work, the aforementioned films as well as, rather obviously, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The piecemeal feel of A.I.'s story may be related to Spielberg's hand in the writing of the screenplay, and the multiple transformations it has undergone in its thirty-odd year life. Published originally as a short story by Brian Aldiss in Harper's Bazaar in 1969, the story was optioned by Stanley Kubrick, who commissioned a "screen story" by Ian Watson. Kubrick, however, never got around to making the film, but asked Spielberg to do it. After Kubrick's demise, Spielberg decided to rewrite the screenplay and direct the film, as something of a paean to his departed friend. Spielberg hasn't done much writing lately (the last screenplay he penned by himself was 1977's Close Encounters), and it shows. It would appear from A.I. that the director found himself on unfamiliar turf, and could only express the events and emotions of the story through endless citations of his own previous work.
Again like all of Spielberg's work, the story has mythic proportions. And this is one of my own personal beefs with the director; everything must happen on a grand scale. So, we follow our robot hero David's (Haley Joel Osment) fall from grace and ejection from the Eden of family life for which he was created, his trials and tribulations in the world of flesh, his descent into the underworld, and eventual apotheosis and reunion with his sainted human mother Monica (Frances O'Connor). The particulars of this version of
the hero's journey are as follows. Sometime in an
unspecified future, after global environmental
disaster, the human race finds itself unable to
provide sufficiently for itself. Accordingly, the
governments of the remaining "developed" nations step
in to regulate who can have children and when, and
begin to produce robot workers who will consume no
resources but labor for mankind's continued existence.
Spotting a potential cash cow, Cybertronics engineer
Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) develops a new generation of
robot that will learn to love its "parents" and thus
provide the "perfect" proxy for childless couples.
Interestingly, in one of the story's inconsistencies,
we are shown a society obsessive about controlling
consumption and the conservation of resources, which
nevertheless is still steadfastly consumer-driven: the
answer to all our problems can be found in the perfect
product, in this case a robotic child. Just so, Dr.
Hobby arranges a test run of David with Cybertronics
employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife
Monica, whose own son has been cryogenically frozen
until a cure for his illness can be found.
Just as the family is settling in with "mecha" son
David, the miracle cure is found for organic son
Martin (Jake Thomas). ("Mecha" is short for
"mechanical," and the film constantly refers to the
uneasy relationship between human and cyborg with the
awkward nicknames "mecha" and "orga" for "organics.")
Of course, tensions between the two "sons" arise and
eventually the family decides they must return David
to Cybertronics for "destruction." Monica can't bring
herself to end David's life in this way, so she rather
inexplicably leads him into a dark forest and abandons
him with the lame apology, "I'm sorry I didn't tell
you about the world." Having recently become fixated
on the story of Pinocchio, lost boy David sets out
to find his own "blue fairy" who will turn him into a
"real" boy so that his mother will love him back and
he may return home.
David is helped along the way by Gigolo Joe (Jude Law)
a freelance love-mecha responsible for the sexual
pleasures of lonely women. A.I. goes to great
length to establish Joe's heterosexuality, even while
his pretty boy face, over-stylized appearance, fetishy
black shiny suit, and overcoat scream "gay" at his
every perfectly poised dance step and swish of his
coattails. The two robot boys encounter the torture
and persecution of non-humans at the hillbilly
hoe-downs known as "Flesh Fairs," where robots are
dismembered, exploded, melted with acid, etc., for the
delectation of humans engaged in a "celebration of
life." They visit Rouge City, a sort of love-mecha and
prostitution central, and eventually make their way to
the "end of the world," the watery remains of New York
City (coastal cities were all submerged by the melting
of the polar ice caps, you see), all in search of the
elusive blue fairy.
Admittedly, there is a lot of story going on here, and
A.I. takes its good-natured time telling it -- the
film clocks in around two and a half hours. The good
news (at least for me) is that there is no blue fairy
waiting for David at the end of his journeys to grant
him his heart's desire. It's a rather somber ending
for David, and one that might thoughtfully suggest
that the answer to human (or cyborg) misery is not to
be found in the intervention of some mystical force,
but by our own dedication to something like universal
justice -- and there's that Spielbergian
humanitarianism again. This possibility is, however,
offset in general by the maudlin melodrama of the rest
of the film and in particular by the final narrative
"resolution" to David's "real" boy/robot boy
conundrum, which is the Nutra-Sweet-iest moment of the
film. It's not the best taste to have in your mouth as
you head for the exit doors.
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