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| Directed by Steven Spielberg; Starring Haley Joel Osment, Frances O’Connor, Jude Law, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, and Daveigh Chase, and voices include Jack Angel, Ben Kingsley, Robin Williams, and Meryl Streep |
Everyone knows Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a fanfare made famous by Stanley Kubrick by using it to segue into space for his 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. What people often don’t know, however, is that there is more to the piece than the fanfare they know — half of the actual orchestrations are of an eerier sense, a type of music that fit the later moments of 2001. Now with A.I., Steven Spielberg has made another place where Kubrick could have used that “Zarathustra” opening — even more than 2001, the opening theme fits A.I. almost perfectly.
By now, the stories of Spielberg collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on A.I. have been documented ad nauseum. No longer does it matter how the two worked or what happened when Kubrick died soon after finishing Eyes Wide Shut, the true importance is in the final product and whether it is the glorious, yet cold perfection that each director would have brought to the film on their own. Yes, the film is dedicated to Kubrick and carries a production credit (unusually might I add, the actual credit is “An Amblin/Stanley Kubrick Production), but the actual production was completely helmed by a Steven Spielberg trying desperately to be his mentor without losing his own touch.
The final creation is something of note — an amalgam of two men in a story that would have touched each one in completely different ways. Spielberg, the wide-eyed optimist, the child forever working in the biggest playground he could ever imagine, would have probably made the film differently had it come to him without the previous work of Kubrick (who had been working on the film since the 1980’s after giving up on his Napoleon project). Kubrick, the life-beaten pessimist, the cynic constantly obsessed with human nature’s continued destruction, had worked on the film for so long that even his original vision had fallen to the wayside with various contributors including sci-fi writers Ian Watson, Bob Shaw, and Brian Aldiss (whose “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” was the story that set Kubrick off on the film in the first place), as well as 2001 co-writer Arthur C. Clarke. Their pairing is both miraculous and annoying — each one has their own credits and debits and the mixing of these two almost throws the film off. A production of less grace and virtue would have probably folded under the dueling styles.
The ad campaign for A.I. has been rather ambiguous, as has always been the case with Kubrick films. All that can be told from the two trailers and four TV spots is that it is a futuristic Pinocchio story — an artificial child yearning to become real. However, there is so much more to the film beyond expectations based upon these few visions Warner Bros. and DreamWorks have shown.
When the film opens, a narrator (Kingsley) tells of the world’s problems following the melting of the polar icecaps. Major cities are under water, small countries completely fall, and larger countries are forced to find new ways to take care of universal starvation. In New Jersey, a company called Cybertronics is hard at work on their next line of human-like robots, a business that has boomed over the years with robots that can become menservants as well as lovers. The head of Cybertronics is Allen Hobby, who has a dream of creating child robots that can love their “parents” like a real son or daughter.
Flash forward twenty months (an arbitrary amount of time that definitely sounds Kubrickian). Cybertronics scientist Henry Swinton (Robards) brings home the pilot version of these robots to his wife Monica (O’Connor). Their biological son Martin (Thomas) is currently frozen awaiting treatment for his terminal disease and they can only sit and hope that a cure can be discovered soon. Henry thinks that bringing in this cyborg son will help Monica in dealing with the loss of their child (his cure seems rather doubtful) and Monica almost dutifully accepts him, though does not care for him. The boy, named David (Osment) by Cybertronics, obsesses with learning how to be real — he sips an empty cup, eats from an empty dish, and considers every moment of indignation to be nothing more than a game. After some time falling for the small child, Monica begins to love him and brings out the paperwork to ‘imprint’ him, an action that will cause David to love her back unconditionally and forever. After holding the back of his neck and speaking a seven-word code, David begins to love her; he begins to call her ‘Mommy.’
Through some events that I will not tell — if the ad campaign is going to be kind and not give away beyond the first 30 minutes, neither will I — David begins to dream of becoming a real boy through the magic of The Blue Fairy, the mystical person that made Pinocchio become a real boy in the story that Monica often reads to her two sons, one comatose, one mechanical. He has two friends to help him on the way to finding his fairy: Teddy (voiced by Angel, delivering a better sidekick than Wilson in Cast Away), a smart mechanical teddy bear that was once Martin’s, and Gigolo Joe (Law), a lover robot that has been framed for the murder of one of his ‘Janes.’ Their journey takes them through many different worlds, places where they find either help or harm from various characters including the Vince McMahon-like Lord Johnson-Johnson (Gleeson) and a computer generated wizard (voiced by Williams).
For nearly two hours and fifteen minutes, A.I. remains consistently engaging and enthralling. The many scenarios, with the possible exception of David’s meeting with Johnson-Johnson, seem perfectly Kubrickian. Spielberg makes the mood cold and the shots (with a great deal of help from genius cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) flow like Kubrick would have made them. Certain scenes, especially the more domestic ones, feel like The Shining meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a closer association with The Shining. During this 85 percent of the film, A.I. is perfection, its tone and style seems perfect to the story through the eyes of someone who is the antithesis of this tone and style. And then, in the last moments, Spielberg kicks in and the film begins to lose some of its touch. There is a beautiful moment that would have served as a great last shot, but Spielberg instead continues.
A.I. definitely features some of the best performances from an ensemble this year. Jude Law plays his character over-the-top but only until he brings memories of Alex in A Clockwork Orange with heart, albeit a mechanical one. William Hurt seems all knowing, but yet sentimental at his lack of knowledge, possibly his best performance since Kiss of the Spider Woman. The normally forgettable Frances O’Connor does her first really respectable work since the 1997’s Aussie indie Kiss or Kill.
But by the end, the only real performer that comes to mind is Haley Joel Osment — he carries the entire film gracefully. Anyone that thought he was nothing more than a cute moppet should just catch his work as David, which goes far beyond his Oscar nominated turn in The Sixth Sense. Osment balances both realism and artifice at a perfect level. Spielberg has a long history of hiring youths for major characters in his films and this is the first one to hold up beside Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.
It’s weird thinking back on A.I. — at times I’d swear I just saw a new Kubrick film, at other times I’d say that it was a new Spielberg film. However, once you get beyond the ending, the occasional sentimentality, the garishly brilliant Johnson-Johnson sequence, and the child in peril theme, the Spielberg comparisons end and A.I. becomes another masterpiece of Stanley Kubrick. All the debits seem Spielbergian, most of the credits seem Kubrickian — but I do not think that Steven Spielberg should be denounced for his efforts. To almost perfectly pull off the style of Stanley Kubrick without hindering your own style is tantamount and, though definitely his most challenging, A.I. may prove to be his finest non-WWII creation in decades.
