Dear Mark,
I found “A.I.” boring, pretentious, visually drab, emotionally uninvolving and at least one-third longer than it needed to be. And I’d had high hopes for the film, because I love sci-fi. Can’t get enough of those edgy futuristic thrillers. Give me a good, meaty robot rebellion and you’ve made my day. But this one left me colder than a cyborg in a cryogenic chamber. Am I missing something?
Respectfully yours,
Julia
Dear Julia,
Yes.
Robotically yours,
Mark
Dear Mark,
Look, you’re not fooling anybody. I know you’re human. I’ve seen your cubicle. Speaking of robots, I’ll admit that Haley Joel Osment does a terrific job as the mechanical urchin; his performance alone is almost reason enough to see the film. And Jude Law makes a dandy robotic Lothario. But their work comes in the midst of a badly muddled film, one filled with implausible actions and dubious symbology.
Julia
Julia,
You’re not alone in your reaction. The Trib has been bombarded with angry e-mails from moviegoers who read Michael Wilmington’s 4-star review of “A.I.” and then apparently hated every stinkin’ second of it. I wouldn’t presume to tell you and various readers what’s good for you, but I must say I’ve been struck by how much of the criticism against “A.I.” — among the so-called pros as well as everyday moviegoers — seems to be damning it for failing to be the movie they hoped to see. If you expect “A.I.” to provide the kind of satisfying emotional payoff for which Spielberg is famous, you’re destined to be disappointed. But I think Spielberg’s after something much creepier and more haunting. And I was effectively creeped out and haunted; the movie has stuck with me like no other I’ve seen this year.
Mark
Mark,
There are times, most certainly, when an audience’s negative reaction is predicated on unmet expectations. Perhaps that’s true for those readers who are clutching an “A.I.” ticket stub in one chubby fist while shaking the other in the direction of Tribune Tower.
But that’s simply not the case for me. I revel in ambiguity; I’m happiest with unhappy endings. It wasn’t the darkness that troubled me about “A.I.”; it wasn’t the lack of what you call “a satisfying emotional payoff.” It was the waste of a haunting question: Can machines become human? We already know how to make machines think like humans; can we make them feel like humans? The movie began its journey so promisingly (the scene in which the mom imprints with David is riveting) and then seemed to fall into a big postmodern pothole of strained symbology and cockeyed abstraction. I felt cheated by “A.I.” not because it didn’t do what I wanted it to do; I felt cheated because it didn’t do what it seemed to want to do: explore the strange Maginot line between organic and mechanical in an age of technological innovations that seem to be narrowing that line to invisibility.
Julia
Julia,
Ah, now we’re getting to the center of the Tootsie-Pop. I think the mistake is concluding that the movie is about whether machines can become human. It’s not that, and it’s not just a futuristic “Pinocchio,” though it’s consciously playing with that idea. To my mind the key exchange comes at the beginning when the woman who uses “conundrum” so self-consciously asks the William Hurt scientist what the responsibility is of a human to a creation programmed to love it, and Hurt responds that God created Adam in his own image. The implication is that God created and apparently abandoned Man (please excuse the biblical sexism), and the mother does essentially the same thing to David, whom she has “imprinted” to love her. So, to get all lofty and high-minded on you, look at David’s journey as a parallel to Man’s never-ending quest to obtain proof of God’s love. Or stay closer to the Earth and view “A.I.” as the story of the extremes to which a boy will go to get confirmation of his mother’s love.
This kid has been programmed so indelibly that he’ll literally go to the end of the Earth to get Mommy to say she loves him, and this desire will outlast all of humankind. And the scary part is, I know people like that. This movie is sad. Psychoanalysts should be studying it for years.
M
M,
May I say, by way of a backhanded compliment, that your exegesis of “A.I.” strikes me as more enlightened and interesting than anything in the movie? And that’s just the problem, of course: Forgive me, but you seem to be contorting the movie to make it fit your interpretation. If it’s not about a futuristic scenario wherein machines lurch toward the human, then why does Spielberg lavish such attention on the Flesh Fair, among the most disturbing and searingly memorable scenes in the film? Clearly, the human-machine split was much on his mind.
But I know how easy it is to want something to fit a pet theory, how hard one works to wedge an explanation onto a resistant frame. I was riding the “L” the other day and the young man in front of me had a T-shirt whose back read, “IMPLY THE BEST.” I puzzled over this through several stops: Imply the best? Why not be the best? Why imply it? I finally decided, after much feverish contemplation, that the phrase had to be the slogan for some cynical marketing firm. “Imply the best” meant that one should float the fiction of a quality product and then substitute an inferior one.
At that point, the young man moved to leave the train, and I saw that a wrinkle had hidden what the shirt actually said: SIMPLY THE BEST.
Mark, “A.I.” is like that shirt: Don’t try to make sense out of what’s not really there.
J
J,
Et tu, Julia? Impugning the motives of someone who reacts to an artistic work in a different way from you? Don’t you hate it when readers do that to you? Double-tsk.
My “pet theory” is honestly what I took from the movie, emotionally as well as intellectually, and a second viewing confirmed my response. Those themes are there, stated fairly plainly. Yes, the human-machine split is integral to the story, just as it is in Kubrick’s “2001.” In both cases you can argue that the robots become more “human” — at least in some idealized definition — than the people. The Flesh Fair scene, by the way, is my least favorite in the film. There’s nothing futuristic or innovative in communicating the understandable hostility toward robots (they’re usurping people’s roles, after all) through some demonized rock ‘n’ roll spectacle populated by yelping yokels.
But I don’t think the movie is about rooting for David to become a real boy. Whether or not he does strikes me as immaterial; the power lies in the depiction of this obsessive, unsettling journey. Spielberg’s narrative strategy is unconventional, which I think is part of what’s driving some audience members nuts. The first section, the most gripping, sustained piece of filmmaking, is from the parents’ point of view. The second “act” shifts more to David’s perspective, and the third is still about David but from a more cosmic, narrated vantage point. When I saw “A.I.” the second time, I could feel a collective “Oy” from the crowd as the story jumped ahead 2,000 years. Many people have told me they would have rather just left David at the bottom of the sea than taken that narrative leap; it certainly throws cold water on the notion that you’re going to get a tidy resolution in the human characters’ lifetimes. But leaving him stranded in liquid Coney Island would have elicited “What’s the point?” reactions, giving him a “Pinocchio”-style happy ending would have been false, and if you give Spielberg credit for having actual reasons for including that third, admittedly-a-bit-static third section, an examination of the whys reveals a whole set of deeper meanings.
M
M,
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that your reaction wasn’t honest — only that it doesn’t mesh with what’s on the screen. Audiences have the right to expect an emotional and logistical plausibility in even the most far-flung fantasies; the best works of art, of course, hew to that line no matter how far afield they fling us, past or future. And to me, the ripping sound that viewers intuitively hear between the fairly straightforward (and compelling) narrative of David’s life up until the moment when he hops into the drink and everything thereafter is disturbing and pointless. The symbols seem phony and contrived. The Blue Fairy is a red herring.
At the risk of sounding churlish, allow me to make one small point harking back to an earlier theme of yours: unmet expectations. Spielberg has created many tales of the quest motif to which you alluded, of children searching for the beacon of a lost tenderness. Is your theory that the movie is more about a boy’s journey than the world’s future — which gets Spielberg off the hook for the film’s disjointed feel — based more upon that expectation than what he actually created here? In other words, have you trapped Spielberg in your interpretation the same way David was stuck in the cockpit of that incredibly cool police copter, a prisoner of ice and time?
Let me admit, moreover, that if the film indeed is not about a futuristic scenario addressing the question of what it means to be human, and is actually about a kid’s search for mom, I’m already bored. No offense, but I’m just not interested in any more pint-sized sojourners. What drew me to “A.I.” was the idea of an artistic engagement with a pressing cultural and technological issue. If it’s “Lassie Come Home,” I’m outta here.
J
J,
I think the beauty of the movie, and much of which we would dare to call Art (such a bad word these days!), is that it can’t be reduced to a one-sentence plot summary. It’s about a lot of things, including what it means to be human. What I’m saying is that people who are disappointed in the emotional ride because they can’t warm up to David and don’t experience a “Spielbergian” payoff are missing the point.
“A.I.” is not about “a kid’s search for mom,” because he’s not a kid; he’s a robot. You, the viewer, are being challenged about how to feel. In the first part, you probably find him creepy. Later, you may find yourself warming up to him more even though you know he’s a machine acting consistent with how he’s programmed. I don’t think you’re supposed to forget he’s a machine and thus cheer for him to find the Blue Fairy, become “real” and receive mommy hugs. I think the ending, which Trib columnist John Kass accused of being an “Old Yeller”-like “tear-jerker,” is supposed to make you feel as uneasy as anything that preceded it. And that’s OK. The problem is that moviegoers have been programmed, too: to accept everything at face value and to judge films solely on whether they deliver emotionally. This is not the Spielberg of “E.T.” This is a much more complicated, mysterious Spielberg. I, for one, welcome that.
M
M,
I love “Old Yeller.”
J
J,
Yeah, but wouldn’t you have loved to have seen the Kubrick version?
M
