because you can't have too much entertainment... July 2000

My Brain is Falling Out
A.I. Artificial Intelligence Dir: Steven Spielberg. Starring: Haley Joel Osment, William Hurt, Frances O Connor, Jude Law, & numerous celebrity voice cameos.

(Portions of this review were previously published in David Poland's addictive Hot Button column where I was proud to be "Reader of the Day")

My head hurts. It's been two weeks since I first saw A.I. Artificial Intelligence and I still can't get it out of my mind. Ordinarily this would be a good sign. But A.I. is no ordinary film. It is, as you've probably heard, the bastard love child of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. The whole odd mess is inspired by, but diverges considerably from, a suggestive short story by Brian Aldiss called "Super Toys Last All Summer Long" (which you really should read). In fact, so much has been written about the genesis of the project that it's almost better to suffer a blow to the head before seeing it and start fresh. Everyone I've talked to describes a different film after seeing it. I believe this is due to their collective memories of Kubrick and Spielberg...and not through any magical alchemies of what ended up onscreen. So before you watch, forget what you know.

Prologue (Exposition)

That's not so easy to do at first. The film starts with a slow, portentous exposition scene with Gepetto scientist William Hurt (he's made a little boy!) and a roomful of robotics experts. One of them is the seriously inquisitive April Grayce (great in 1999's Magnolia but always relegated to bit parts -boo hoo) and she asks some pertinent thematically relevant (or so we think) questions that we're sure will come into play very soon.

"David, be careful"

Act I -"Super Toys Last All Summer Long"

After that scene, A.I. quickly slips right in to its best moments. From our first glimpse of David (the mecha child at the heart of this sci-fi fairy tale) the film works a creepy magic. In the early portion of the film your senses are flooded with terrifically suggestive images, questions about the nature of love, what technology does to humanity, human need and denial, and a quagmire of dysfunctional feelings about the nature of parenthood. There are great scenes galore and boom! Inevitably the curtain must close on Act One. It does so brilliantly with a cast-to-the-wolves abandonment scene that's positively nightmarish in its evocation of childhood fears.

Act II -Hey Joe, What Do You Know?

Suddenly the film shifts tone rather smartly. It's a nice head game. Pull the rug out from under us in an appropriately unexpected way: There's no way that the outside world and adolescence should feel the same as home and childhood -but we want it to. The transition is fine but for one problem: We've switched protagonists. As entertaining as Jude Law is as the love mecha Gigolo Joe (and believe me, there are few onscreen performers as watchable or as generally superb as Law) the film makes a mistake in switching over to him. It's a defendable choice in a couple of ways but it messes with the structure of the overall piece in too many ways. The centerpiece of Act Two is the gorey Flesh Fair where the movie abruptly switches themes again. It is here where I began to suspect that what we had here was not a movie with complex and rich themes but a movie with a surplus of themes. Apparently little time was spent shaping any of them into something multi-dimensional but eventually cohesive. The film feels like a rough draft in several patches.

"Hey, Joe, what do you know?"

Act III -Pinnochio
Epilogue (More Exposition)

"My Brain is Falling Out." When the superb actor Haley Joel Osment delivers that line near what I was hoping would be the end of the film, I was stunned by how moving it was... but he had no help from the film itself. This line perfectly encapsulates what evidently was happening with Mr. Spielberg behind the scenes. He bit off more than he could chew. A.I. Artificial Intelligence begins promisingly. It has an undeniably absorbing premise and it sets dozens of fascinating ideas in motion. Unfortunately it slowly and accidentally proceeds to destroy each of those ideas one by one. Every intelligent or complex theme is either tossed aside, contradicted, or deeply misunderstood in the latter half of the film. Watching Act III and especially the ridiculously absurd and comical 20 minute epilogue that follows is an excruciatingly painful experience.

The debate currently raging over A.I. is not likely to end anytime soon. It's a love it or hate it film. You might feel both emotions at once. Rarely have I seen such a divide between good scenes and bad film.The movie has glorious and haunting cinematography courtesy of the great Janusz Kaminski. (My personal favorites: "David" under the water in the pool and Manhattan half submerged late in the film.) The visual effects are superb. The score works well in its less bombastic moments. Above all else there's the exquisitely calibrated central performance by Haley Joel Osment. He deserves enormous credit for nearly holding the movie together despite Spielberg's clumsy attempts to wrap the disparate elements up. But the beautiful things about A.I. only make its shortcomings sadder.There are those who will defend the film's bizarre structural and tonal shifts and its web of ideas -in no small part due to affection for the film's odd-couple parentage. But in the end it doesn't work well at all. The inconsistencies and contradictions that the film is riddled with are not delicious ironies. They're not even terribly thought provoking. They are sizeable mistakes in storytelling, screenwriting, and thematic coherence. So finally the only useful purpose the movie serves is as an excellent conversation piece. This strange sci-fi fairy tale makes for a deeply wierd and incoherent film. The maker (Spielberg) did not understand his own creation (the movie) -rather fitting since that's ostensibly one of the themes of his piece as well.

Perhaps it was Spielberg who lost his brain.

-Nathaniel

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