The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has bowed to reviews that link the occasionally staggering scale of its production design to the director’s meticulously ordered stop-motion film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Certainly the two stand as the most thoroughly crafted works in the oeuvre of a man whose trademark is his fussy attention to detail; in The Grand Budapest Hotel, hotel lobbies, prisons, even Alpine monasteries are created in such lavishly minute precision that the logistics of each impeccably straightened sign, every spotless carpet threaten to divert all attention away from the narrative at hand. In execution, however, the film belongs more with its immediate predecessor, Moonrise Kingdom, as both an unmistakable continuation of its maker’s singular style and an increasingly sophisticated breakdown of it.

From a narrative standpoint, no Wes Anderson film has ever been this convoluted. Typically, the director’s films spend more time merely introducing the characters and their strictly regimented habits than they do detailing what those people get up to. That is not to say that there is not conflict or drive in Anderson’s movies, but that said conflict typically arises from the intrusion of reality and lived, experienced wisdom upon the myopic headspace of stunted wunderkinder, a forceful denial and eventual acceptance of how ignorant these self-perceived geniuses truly are. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films in which the outside sources of awakening do not come as a natural course of maturation but from the direct imposition of actively hostile forces. Set primarily during WWII, the film presents a series of nested narratives involving characters whose pluck, intelligence and wit is slowly revealed to be utterly inadequate a defense against forces hellbent on eradicating the old way of things. Anderson routinely presents a sense of style and fashion far removed from the present; The Grand Budapest Hotel hones in on the last moment such modes were considered contemporary and proper before being violently stomped out.

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012)

Joe Wright's previous literary adaptations have been awkward affairs, defined by a perennially miscast Kiera Knightley and an ostentatious visual style that overpowered whatever sense of respect with which he attempted to treat Austen and McEwan. The same is true of The Soloist, which tries to take mental illness seriously but aestheticizes it to such an extreme degree that the whole movie beatifies paranoid schizophrenia. Last year's Hanna worked better than his first three features precisely because the stakes of the material were lower, allowing the director to indulge himself even more and revealing that his prior films actually exhibited some form of restraint.

Anna Karenina reunites the director with his leading lady and, more broadly speaking, canonical adaptations. But it resembles the director of Hanna more than the maker of Atonement, at last jettisoning Wright's lip-service reverence for his source novels to fully bend a great work of literature to his own ends. If over-direction marred his earlier works, Wright here gives in fully to his id, making over-direction its raison d’être. If that means the director gives less precedence to the book being adapted, it marks no change from his earlier films save that Wright is finally being honest with people. By dropping the pretense, the most over-directed work by the most notorious over-director currently working stands clearly as his best work to date.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

For the six people out there who still love 3D, Hugo will be the film of the year. To be sure, no other film from any year is so well-suited for the format. Concerning the earliest days of cinema, where the medium still oscillated between kitschy gimmick and potential artform, Hugo was directed by Martin Scorsese, a director fascinated by the artifice of cinema and how its inherent falsity can nevertheless draw in a viewer like no other art. This makes 3D doubly appropriate, and as much as I loathe the tackiness of even the supposedly advanced iteration of the technology that is already flaming out brilliantly, Hugo makes such inventive and striking use of 3D that I hate what Scorsese's done as much as I love it. Hugo is too ambitious to make any money, but even so; could the director pump some life back into 3D just as it seemed we were free of this headache that comes once every three decades?

Set in the vast Parisien train station Gare Montparnasse in the early '30s, Hugo follows its titular hero (Asa Butterfield), the orphaned child of a clockmaker, as he moves within the walls of station winding its various timekeepers and swiping meals from oblivious vendors. He also collects gears to repair a rusted automaton his father (Jude Law) brought home before he died in a museum fire, hoping that continuing his father's work will somehow bring the man back in some form. But when an old toy vendor (Ben Kingsley) catches him trying to steal parts from one of his wind-up mice, Hugo finds himself thrust into a deeper story of embitterment and rejuvenation, one that holds the key to his own issues even as it plunges him into a whole new world.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Steven Spielberg: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Given that my return to A.I. is what prompted my decision to revisit all of Steven Spielberg's films in the first place, I was afraid I had nothing to add to my original review. However, I think I mostly avoided retreading and if I have no particularly new point to make about the ending, I do at least come at it from a different angle in response to Roger Ebert's recent addition of the film into his Great Movies canon, a move that makes me happy but does not preclude me from disagreeing with his interpretation. I stand by this being Spielberg's finest film, and also one that I think is better for his involvement, not some second-best option to a Kubrick direction (Kubrick likely would have agreed, since he urged Spielberg to take it well before he passed). Perhaps the most philosophical blockbuster ever made, and certainly one of the finest American films of the Aughts.

Check out my new review of the film at Cinelogue.

Repo Men

Quite often at the theater, I sit morosely during the trailers, made to watch simultaneously the most marketable aspects of a coming attraction and everything about it that might turn me off the film -- if I wasn't so lazy and unwilling to move from my spot once I find one in a theater, even during the previews, I might take after Gene Siskel and stand out in the lobby to avoid hearing the best jokes for upcoming comedies and the unwittingly revealed plot twists of thrillers. At every screening, I suppress a groan of pain at some (at the very least) of the previews, whose offensive banality is only made worse by the mutterings of the strangers around me and the occasional friend that the film being teased looks "great" and that "we've gotta see that." I found the tables turned, however, in recent weeks as trailers for some gonzo-looking sci-fi ride called Repo Men played in advance of the few films I've attended this year. In all cases, the audiences either laughed derisively or sat in silence, leaving me to wonder, "Am I the only person who thinks this actually looks kind of good?"

That was then. Repo Men boasts a ridiculous premise: in the future, a giant corporation known as The Union sells artificial organs to patients in need of transplants. The business charges exorbitant prices, and if (or when) people cannot pay, The Union sends officials to repossess the unpaid item. Absurd, isn't it? Imagine such a world, where a profit-driven intermediary stood between doctors and patients. How could such a business, which repossesses so much of its property, make any money? What money lender would ever agree to finance staggering loans that lessees cannot hope to pay? Madness, I tell you.

Jude Law plays Remy, one of the Union's titular repo men, a cold professional who cannot be moved by pleas or threats. He zaps an overdue client with a taser, opens the unfortunate sod and reclaims the organ, no matter how vital. As a company courtesy, he asks his victims if they require a trip to the hospital, usually while they're still unconscious. Along with his best friend, the more thuggish Jake (Forest Whitaker), Remy is one of The Union's finest employees. The bond between the two is so strong that when he gets word of Remy's job hunting, Jake rigs their defibrillator to backfire, thus damaging Remy's heart. He'll require a new one from The Union. To pay it off, Remy must remain at the firm, and with Jake.

With such a clever setup, covering both sociopolitical and personal basis, the eventual failure of Repo Men comes as a major disappointment. The dynamic between Remy and Jake, as well as Remy's change of heart regarding his occupation provides an identifiable character base to anchor the social implications, but director Miguel Sapochnik does not expand upon the rich possibilities of Eric Garcia's script.

Once the plot begins to roll, it snowballs away from contemporary relevance, eventually outpacing coherence as well. Remy's wife, who is somewhat creepily made into an unreasonable bitch almost immediately without any background into her character (a particular waste of the wonderful Dutch actress Carice van Houten), throws him out of the house when he awakens from his coma, and soon he flees his bosses, unable to do his job and therefore make his payments. He meets a singer, Beth (Alice Braga), who has an artificial "everything else" to go with Remy's fake heart. Sapochnik speeds through their vague recollection of each other into a romance to insert a requisite sex scene before they band together to tear down the evil corporation through over-kinetic action scenes that dispense of the black comedy of the film's start for facile sight gags and uninteresting stunts. Sapochnik's vision of the future is dull in that drably colored, dimly lit aesthetic that has become cheap shorthand for unwelcoming dystopias, fueling both good films -- Children of Men, The Road -- and bad (don't get me started).

"Vision" may be too generous a word. Repo Men's title proves quite apt, as Sapochnik appropriates design elements, plot devices and genre tropes from nearly every significant science fiction film that can be remotely tied to it. All of its shots of the city skyline of future Toronto resemble Blade Runner's Los Angeles, and the character of Remy resembles Deckard to a T, from his proficiency at his job to the overall irony of his involvement in his occupation (provided you pitch your tent in the "Deckard as replicant" camp). Its "fugitive on the run" scenes recall Logan's Run, and damn near everything -- the notion of a future run through heartless bureaucracy, the black comedy -- from Brazil except the visual ingenuity. It even shamelessly recreates the intense hallway fight from Oldboy, sapping all the fury and comedy out of the original and existing solely, one supposes, because the director thought Park Chan-wook's film was cool.

Repo Men has its moments. Both Law and Whitaker play their parts well, underwritten as they are. Liev Schreiber ported over his gruffness from the Wolverine movie into the role of Remy's boss and one of the public faces of The Union, and his imposing presence adds both weight and humor to his scenes, wherein he gently runs through the same damn speech to every potential client and forces their hand to choose lifelong debt (though that may not be quite so long) over death. Occasionally, the action becomes as goofy and intentionally laughable as its trying to be. But I couldn't help but focus on one scene, early in the film, when Remy, determined to pull off one last job before transferring, decides to reclaim the heart of a favorite musician. In his delusion, he justifies this sickening form of hero worship and god killing as doing the man a favor; "The guy who rips out his heart may as well as well be a fan of his music." It's such a brilliantly comedic and, when the musician resigns himself and asks only to finish one last song, oddly touching scene that it points to a much better film, and the problems begin to arise as soon as this sequence ends.

The first 20 minutes of Repo Men announce the most intelligent and incisive science fiction film in years, containing a brain and a heart. But, like the organs that make up its MacGuffins, they are artificial, merely rote setups to a mind-numbing display. Capped off by a final twist that not only completes the ripoff of one of its sources but adds only one final meaningless gesture. As with all the other artistic thefts in Repo Men, it carries over only the surface, capturing none of the depth beneath it. Perhaps the key to unlocking the film's ultimate ignorance lies in its usage of the example of Schrödinger's cat, at first potentially clever until we finally hear Remy's interpretation of it, which is about as stupid as you'd expect from a man who at one point boasts that he has a "small brain, big skull."

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam's latest feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, arrives in theaters just as besotted with issues as all of his other tortured productions, but if only one positive aspect arose from Heath Ledger's death (and I can think of no other remotely bright side to that tragedy), it is that it secured Gilliam's film a wide release. In other circumstances, no film this uncompromisingly bizarre could have slipped into so many theaters.

In a year defined, in part, by career-summarizing work from distinctive filmmakers (Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, The Limits of Control), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus treads in Gilliam's familiar milieu -- the splintered line between reality and dreams -- and a decently evocative alternative title might have read: Baron Munchausen's Flying Circus. For, like Munchausen, The Imaginarium opens with an acting troupe, but they remain the focus of the film, traveling from street corner to street corner peddling a curious sideshow that fell out of fashion several centuries ago. For Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), however, it might simply be force of habit, as he claims to be a thousand years old. Flanked by his trusty assistant Percy (Verne Troyer), his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and crier/sleight-of-hand expert Anton (Andrew Garfield), Parnassus peddles his curious contraption -- a horse-driven theater-on-wheels with a curious mirror that promises to show intrepid customers (read: belligerent drunks and petulant children) the grandest reaches of their imagination.

Indeed, when someone bolts through the tacky foil folds of the hyped mirror, they enter a realm controlled by Parnassus but constructed by the thoughts and desires of the person who entered. It's a world of goofy CGI, never remotely realistic and never remotely trying to be. As such, it works as a place of dreams and imagination. Middle-aged women regain their youth and vigor, a boy wades through a world of candies and ice creams while blast things apart through his portable game console; but all who enter are subject not only to their desires and joys but the darker recesses of the mind, twisted temptations that offer an identifiable but cheap thrill amidst the fantastical ecstasy of the rest of the imaginarium.

Master of this twisted subrealm is the devil himself, Mr. Nick, who gave Parnassus the imaginarium, along with everlasting life for winning a bet. The two clearing have a history of games, as Nick appears throughout the film reminding Parnassus that he's meant to take Valentina on her 16th birthday. No one is better suited to the role of the devil, particularly one as smooth and jazzy as this one, as Tom Waits: in his day job, he breathes wheezing, gasping life into decrepit instruments long ago banished to a musical hell (including his voice, a ragged, beautiful tatters at this point), and if he is not the Hades of the musical world he is at least its Charon, the ferryman who guides lost, depraved souls to their final resting place. As an actor, Waits has the curious ability to appear in supporting roles, usually off-kilter and occasionally manic ones, and steal the show without hoarding the attention or chewing scenery. Nick promises to forgo his claim to Valentina's soul with yet another bet, promising her to the one who collects five souls first. How Parnassus actually collects the souls of those who enter and re-emerge is never made clear, nor what he does with those souls (the same is true, actually, for Satan), but the wager reveals an odd relationship between the devil and Parnassus: the devil is a trickster and a deceiver, but he likes to gamble more than win. He tends to enjoy a more cruel victory later when he "loses" anyway, but the act of outright winning the bet means he can't play anymore, which disappoints him more than losing face. Over time, we see that each is perhaps the truest friend the other has.

To collect souls, Parnassus must woo an eager crowd, something he hasn't done in decades. But a glimmer of hope appears in Tony (Heath Ledger, for a time), whom the troupe discovers hanging from a bridge. Suffering from amnesia, Tony alludes to a darker past involving the mob, but he proves an apt pitchman, drawing crowds with his seductive speechifying. To continue after Ledger's passing, Gilliam used Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell for Tony's scenes inside the imaginarium, and it's a move that works brilliantly, revealing the idealized portrait of the women he leads inside (as well as his own ever-shifting opinion of himself, allowing each of the three replacement actors to cater to their personae: Depp reflecting his rakishness, Farrell his darkness and Law his fresh-faced boyhood). Both Tony and Parnassus contain a bit of Gilliam, Tony being the one to entice you into the theater almost against your will and Parnassus the supreme creator of the impossible. Tony entrances crowds by reminding of them what no longer exists in the modern world -- the profound epiphany of imaginative storytelling -- something Gilliam clearly mourns as he gazes upon kids lost in video games and adults who've lost the ability to dream.

None of this is unfamiliar territory for the director, but he uses the limitless opportunity afforded by the structure of the imaginarium for some of his most sumptuous visuals yet. Furthermore, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus reflects just how British the ex-pat's sensibilities have become: Parnassus overflows with British humor, from the Pythonesque absurdity Gilliam helped create (men in dresses gets more than one laugh) to that magnificent deadpan that I'd begun to think was genetic amongst Brits: when some mobsters chase Tony into the imaginarium, Parnassus attempts to win their souls by presenting a group of policemen who ask them to join the force with a song-and-dance number that, buried in the sheer glorious nonsense of the moment, suggests some deliciously wicked reasons for joining, among them that their love of violence and oppression would be legalized. At least one joke is purely for the Brits: when Anton discovers a newspaper revealing some of Tony's past, Tony replies, "Don't believe everything you read in the paper. Especially the [Daily] Mirror." Perhaps Percy summarizes the film's off-kilter, twisted sensibilities by answering the question "Where are we?": "Geographically, Northern Hemisphere. Socially, on the margins. And narratively, with some way to go."

The story doesn't make sense. The ending in particular will frustrate those who appreciate the rest of the film. Yet I can't help but wonder if some of the film's harsher critics -- most of them, perhaps tellingly, American -- have ever even seen one of Gilliam's previous works. He doesn't like to end with a clear answer regarding what actually happened and what might be a dream or hallucination. When a child eying one of Parnassus' miniature plays asks Percy if it comes with "a happy ending," Percy gently declines, saying "We can't guarantee that." That's an appropriate response for a film about imagination: dreams don't always end on a positive note. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is perhaps Gilliam's most uncompromising feature to date; naturally, "uncompromising" does not ensure greatness (I would not hesitate to call Lars von Trier uncompromising), but Gilliam's vision complements Parnassus' scattershot narrative. His film is beautiful, twisted, corkscrewing, confusing, frustrating, tantalizing and tempting, and if Gilliam's goal was to capture the nature of our daydreams and fantasies and place them on the screen, it is my humble opinion that he wildly succeeded. Catch it before theater chains understand just what they've placed alongside banal January fodder and replace it with a romantic comedy about a career-driven businesswoman who needs a man in her life for emotional stability.

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes has and likely will continue to receive attention -- positive, negative, thoughtful and juvenile -- concerning the transparency of its "hinted" homosexual bond between Sherlock Holmes and his trusty friend Dr. Watson. Indeed, they're so inseparable that one might be forgiven for assuming that Guy Ritchie had adapted the work of Sir Arthur Conan Bro-yle. Christ, is this really how I've decided to usher in the new year of this blog? With asinine puns that would make a five-year-old groan? I deeply apologize ladies and gentlemen; if I have offended one or all of my five regular readers I can only assure you that it shan't happen again.

Where were we? Ah yes, Guy Ritchie's action-flick re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes. Well, perhaps it's not as extreme a makeover as some believe: in Doyle's stories, Holmes knew the street fighting techniques Robert Downey Jr. uses every few minutes to knock what few teeth haven't already rotted off out of the mouths of cockney thugs. Downey is, even to this admitted fanboy, astounding in the role of Holmes: one could be forgiven for cynically viewing Downey's casting as proof that producers will seemingly never fund a big-budget British action feature without an American star for insurance, but that ignores both Downey's tenuous, recently founded position as a bankable star and his incandescent performance as the English Charlie Chaplin. Downey captures the full range of the character, Holmes' wit, infinitely broad range of knowledge and powers of deduction.

Furthermore, the world Ritchie builds around Downey and his fantastic performance is an exemplary depiction of Victorian England, flawless in its deep, grimy flaws. The skies maintain a constant gray formed from that terrible mention of London's rainy climate and the pollution of the Industrial Revolution; stagnant rainwater forms into puddles everywhere, but this London is so dull that the water can barely reflect it. A moderate steampunk influence permeates this world, with spring-loaded Derringers and an electric contraption that proves central to a climactic setpiece.

Downey and the background are the two best aspects of the film, but both are outrageously, inexplicably truncated, set aside in a movie that belongs to them in favor of...what, exactly? Certainly not the intricacies of the plot, involving the cultish occupations of one Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, who is now apparently contractually obligated to be a villain in any movie that calls for a British antagonist), a Member of Parliament caught sacrificing young virgins (oy) by Holmes and hanged by the courts. He's pronounced dead -- by none other than Dr. Watson (Jude Law, hopefully staging a comeback after slipping from guaranteed bankability to critical and commercial indifference in the last few years) -- but returns from the grave and continues to kill.

The problem with this setup is that it clearly defines the villain in a "whodunit" movie, which might not have been a detriment had Ritchie streamlined the picture. Yet Sherlock Holmes drones on for two hours with barely enough material to fill a 70-minute film: Law has nothing to do but pout as Watson and occasionally lend a hand in a fight, a streetwise version of Law's performance as Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde. Various interesting characteristics dash fleetingly across the screen -- a gambling problem, the question of his medical acumen in pronouncing a man dead who "returned" from the grave, the tension he suffers from his fiancée and Holmes' rivalry -- but they vanish as soon as they appear, titillating the audience with the promise of three-dimensionality before firmly rooting Watson as nothing more than the straight man (so to speak) for Holmes. Holmes himself has few opportunities to prove his intelligence, never letting us in on a single aspect of his thought process during the main investigation and demonstrating his deductive reasoning in one or two tacked-on scenes inserted to assure the audience that he's a genius; had the writers cut out these scenes -- all of them unimportant and at best barely relevant to the story -- and simply allowed Holmes to deduce relevant clues while still retaining the ultimate mystery until the end, Sherlock Holmes might have been as entertaining as it thinks it is.

And what of that latent homosexuality between Holmes and Watson? Does it provide anything other than nervous titters for gently homophobic crowds? I can think of no reason why Holmes, the most brilliant man in Britain, would revert to the mindset of a five-year-old when faced with the prospect of his dear friend getting engaged. He's above frat-boy sexism, thus leaving a gay crush as the only reasonable explanation, but Ritchie softens this by providing Holmes a romantic foil with Irene Alder (Rachel McAdams), one of only two characters (along with Moriarty) who could successfully match wits with Sherlock Holmes. By injecting her into the film primarily to offset complaints by purists and homophobes, however, Ritchie cheapens the character, along with Holmes: while Downey has a firm grasp on the character, Ritchie and the writers don't, and the only reason Irene -- seen often at the mercy of a mysterious employer -- ever pulls a fast one on Holmes is because he is occasionally forced to act like an idiot for the sake of convenience.

Sherlock Holmes is fun enough, I suppose, and there are far worse ways I could have spent my New Year's midnight screening (some people likely are catching up on the awards bait, so I imagine at least a few poor souls watched Precious). There are a few sly tidbits here and there, such as a cheeky Victorian take on someone hearing a creepy noise then continuing to bathe without a care; the cast largely acquits themselves nicely, and fans of Mike Leigh's black-lighthearted comedy Happy-Go-Lucky should be pleased to see the splendid Eddie Marsan as the questionably competent Inspector Lestrade. It's also wonderful to see Robert Downey, Jr. cleaned up and gaining traction at last in Hollywood as the lead of two concurrent franchises. Long may he reign. But the entire structure of Sherlock Holmes is just off: Holmes doesn't detail any clue until the very end, after an action setpiece that renders further discussion moot and offers only a "oh that's how they did it" montage that would fit better in a CSI episode than a cleverly constructed Holmes tale. By the time it finally gets around to the plot, no one cares, and that's more or less Sherlock Holmes in a nutshell.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence threw me when I first watched it last year; a fan of both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, who began the project after reading Brian Aldiss' Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, I spent much of the film looking for the moments I could readily identify as belonging to either director. It was a rookie mistake, an outgrowth of a dependency on auteur theory to explain away the film and a distraction from the film's actual content and themes. I also tuned out the much-debated final section of the film, buying into the hype (before I'd even read it) that somehow it wasn't worth watching. Upon finishing the film, I nonchalantly popped it back in the Netflix sleeve and sent it back for the next movie in my queue.

Yet certain aspects stuck with me, ideas that I didn't pay attention to while watching the film now gnawing their way through the eroding memory of my "spot the auteur" game and nagging at me to give it another go. What really reinvigorated my interest, however, was Jonathan Rosenbaum's epic, 4000-word treatise on the film, entitled "The Best of Both Worlds." It remains my favorite article of his, and one of my absolute favorite pieces of film criticism. It is my go-to counterargument to those who argue that Rosenbaum is just some pretentious ass incapable of being pleased, using his once-limitless word count at the Chicago Reader to inform everyone how much smarter he was than us. It's also the article I use to introduce neophytes to his work. I could go on about what I love about this beautiful piece, but to do so would turn this review of a film into a rave of a rave that could spiral out of control and spark yet more discussions about my rave of his rave until Charlie Kaufman knocks at my door demanding a royalty payment.

Rosenbaum's praise of the film caused me to reevaluate my own indifference to it and, setting it aside long enough for some of the specifics to fade as to not influence my experience with the film, I at last returned to A.I. Rarely have I been so pleased to discover just how wrong I was.

A.I. opens with the sight and sound of the ocean, serene waves that take on an ominous tone when a narration explains that, in the future, melting ice caps destroyed numerous major cities, displacing millions and leading to mass starvation in poorer countries. The areas that still enjoy some level of prosperity ensure their continuing riches by licensing pregnancies to maintain population levels. With the lowered populace reducing labor, robots become a staple of city life. But Professor Hobby (William Hurt) aspires to the next level of robotics. He dreams of androids that do not only look like humans and experience sensory stimuli but emote.

A year later, an employee at Hobby's company, Henry (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) suffer the pain of their child's illness. Cocooned in a pod reminiscent of the hibernation chambers of 2001 or Alien, young Martin must stay in suspended animation until a cure for his rare disease can be found. This situation makes the couple prime test subjects for Hobby's latest innovation: David. Henry brings home what appears to be an 11-year-old boy, but Monica immediately understands what the boy really is and shouts for it to leave.

With this minimal setup, Spielberg crafts not only his most thought-provoking film (it is admittedly up against slim competition) but one of the most unabashedly philosophical films to ever be produced for mass consumption (and make no mistake, this is very much a film meant for a large audience). This first section of the 150-minute feature is entirely based on emotional development between the "child" and his new "mommy." Monica is repulsed by the machine at first, terrified by the stiff, servile messages coming from this utterly realistic thing. Yet she slowly becomes accustomed to the boy, until at last she agrees to program him with code words that will fully activate his humanistic programming (once this bonding process is done, David cannot be returned to the company without being destroyed), and the moment that David looks up with suddenly softer features and calls Monica "Mommy" is as breathtaking in its simplicity and direct impact as the appearance of the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park is in its epic grandeur.


The first act also establishes an amazing unity between two disparate styles of filmmaking, between Kubrick's often bleak philosophical and anthropological concerns and Spielberg's emotional directness and his notion of cinema as a means of exhilaration and positivity. One of the employees at Hobby's initial presentation broaches a serious question she tags as moral but is equally existential, asking "If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that Mecha in return?" Hobby ducks the question by alluding to the story of creationism (that God created humans to love him, with the unspoken allusion to John 3:14's declaration of God's love of His creation), but sets up one of the basic issues the film addresses and asks us to answer.

Monica, driven by maternal instincts, dotes upon this robot as if her child, but Henry, who was so excited by the invention and pressured his wife into keeping David, sours when confronted with the fully programmed version, put-off by David's sudden humanity (this depiction of a father's excitement with the idea of a kid growing into a resentment and absence when the child finally arrives shows Spielberg getting to the heart of his theme of father-child relationships). When the Swintons' real son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home, David receives his first exposure to human cruelty. I feel that Martin is somewhat justified in hating David, considering that his parents essentially replaced him with this robot while he lied in cryostasis, but he manipulatesDavid's programmed honesty and servility into turning the poor android into an unwittingly terrifying being, at times perceived by the Swintons as a Chucky doll of the 22nd century.

At last, Martin's schemes go to far, and the father orders David's return to the factory for destruction, but the mother cannot bring herself to kill her child, even if he's not technically her child or even alive. She instead takes him to a forest and abandons him with his animatronic toy bear, Teddy. It's a heartbreaking moment, as David displays the extent to which he can feel true emotions and love.

After a fade-out, Spielberg completely shifts gears, and the second act of the film investigates not an individual family who would order something like David but the society that is enthralled with Mechas. The director, working with Chris Baker's 600 pre-production illustrations, crafts a stupefying metropolis called Rouge City that makes Ridley Scott's vision of the consumerist overload of Blade Runner's Los Angeles look like an Amish community. Its epileptic blend of Scott's nightmarish futuristic vision, Las Vegas and the Pleasure Island segment of Disney's Pinocchio, Rouge City is as far away from the idyllic wealthy suburbs where we met David but linked by a nonplussed acceptance of robots among humans. Spielberg's visual evocation of Pinocchio is one of his more sly moves here, lining up nicely with the story's inexorable link to the story of the puppet who became a real boy.

Rouge City

Pleasure Island

Even the character of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the first character introduced in this new segment, can be directly tied to David and his quest to be loved. Just as David was an experiment for humans to project love upon an ideal -- not only might unlicensed couples be allowed to have a child, it would always be stuck in that period of total and unconditional love, never growing old and moving away -- Gigolo Joe is manufactured to cater to every aspect of the physical aspect of human love. Both are empty shells who can only project their ability to love at the expense of any other identifiable traits; when the abandoned David meets Joe and tells him of his quest to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio tale, Joe, on the run after the bitter husband of one of his clients framed him for her murder, offers to tag along to seduce her.

Their search for the Blue Fairy is fraught with danger, as a subsection of society views the rise of Mechas as a threat to the species. In the film's only glaring misstep, both David and Joe are rounded up for a "Flesh Fair," a Thunderdome-esque exposition of Luddite savagery. Well, I say Luddite; everyone in attendance has their own futuristic gadgets, but they destroy any Mechas they can get their hands on in some zealous rage of self-preservation. Where this sequence goes wrong is in its visualization: the Flesh Fair is little more than a motocross, a rock concert(!)(?) and a warped public hanging square all in one, populated only, it seems, by shitkicking working class buffoons, none so poor that we might infer that robotics drove them out of work but displaying typical redneck bloodlust. The scene only redeems itself at its end, when its most eager participant (Brendan Gleeson) trots out David, the first robot to genuinely fulfill the emotional roles of a human, the crowd is so struck by his realism that they refuse to allow him to be destroyed. Does that mean that even a mongoloid mob such as this has some basic civility when confronted with something so well-made they cannot distinguish from a human? Or are they just so collectively dumb that they cannot fathom a machine being made like this despite all their violence predicated on the fear of something like David existing?

The central issue affecting David is the dividing line between "Orga," organic beings, and "Mecha," the robots. It's revealing that the humans, even the ones most adamantly opposed to the technology, do not simply say "man" and "machine," for the Mechas have grown into a type of existence that cannot be differentiated from a humans with the same facility as, say, animals, which technically are Orga. The robot servants and the pleasure bots like Joe can all carry out but one function -- when you strip away his ability for minor independence, the same applies to David -- but they can all reason, react to pain, find a certain pleasure in their lives, even if it's only a programmed response. In an early scene, David sits at the dinner table in his "stock" condition, his emotional programming still unactivated, and suddenly plays a bit of a trick on Henry and Monica bursts into loud laughter, causing both of the humans to laugh just as boisterously. It's a light-hearted and funny scene, but it brings with it a question: the machine David, not even yet programmed to achieve his most human-like behavior, can laugh at something he finds amusing. What, then, separates his mechanical response from the supposedly organic one of Monica and Henry?


Perhaps as a result of Spielberg's framing, though certainly a key aspect of the story, David is more sympathetic than any of the humans we meet; even Monica does not put up a struggle when the patriarchal Henry orders David destroyed, and her idea of a compromise is to simply dump a machine programmed to be a 11-year-old in a forest surrounded by humans who destroy everything they find and hope for the best. When David and Joe use a super-information center called Dr. Know (voiced by a loopy but not obnoxious Robin Williams) to find the Blue Fairy at "the end of the world" (a Manhattan covered by the risen seas), we discover the information was planted in Dr. Know by Hobby to reclaim his invention for analysis. Hobby delights at David's misery and the horrific jealousy he displays when Hobby introduces him to a copy of another David unit, which results in a violent (and futile) act of aggression to prove his individuality.

The final section of the film, set 2000 years after David runs away from Hobby and finds the Coney Island Blue Fairy deep in the ocean, is where even the film's fans suddenly scream in outrage. The first time I watched it, I had no idea what the creatures, seemingly made as much from pure energy as any flesh or metal, actually were; in retrospect, it's easy to tell that they're Mechas because of a sharp visual clue Spielberg gave us early in his out-of-focus, distorted introductory shot of David. The film up to this point pitted Orga against Mecha, but these humanoid Supermechas, wandering a frozen landscape long after humans went extinct, make the distinction meaningless. They scan David's memories and offer to reconstruct a vision of Monica to be with for a single day, allowing him his chance at happiness while giving them a window to study mankind through his experiences.


Many pointed to this segment as saccharine, Spielbergian fluff, though everyone involved is quick to point out that this coda was always in Kubrick's idea of the film. And, frankly, I don't see what people are talking about; David's day with Monica is fun and happy and carefree, yes, but it is also hollow, a programmed emotional stimuli no different than the one David himself was made to provide. In Rosenbaum's review, he noted that the issue broached at Hobby's first meeting tackles the idea of whether a robot and a human could share a mutually loving relationship, but the film never tackles the question of whether robots could be so humanistic that they might love each other. I respectfully disagree; the film revolves around the idea that human love has given way to mechanical, programmed affection, and though the real Monica's love of David obviously does not extend to that of a real human, she is devastated to leave him in the forest. Furthermore, David and Joe share a loving friendship, reliant upon one another for safety, and there is a haunting moment between them as an electromagnet snares Joe and he bids farewell to David with the hauntingly existential "I am...I was." David's vision of Monica at the end professes her unconditional love of David, as affecting but ultimately hollow a display of emotion as David provided to the real version.

This harsh juxtaposition reveals the "shotgun marriage," as Rosenbuam dubs it, between Spielberg and Kubrick auterial concerns. Spielberg's films are about the individual and the emotional resonance of that one person above all else, including accuracy or honest self-appraisal; I still love his Jaws to death, but as a young adult grown out of childhood I'm now somewhat put-off by its subtext, that people can always overcome giant obstacles, even if it means recklessly killing it without ever acknowledging a less violent solution. Kubrick's, on the other hand, are about the loss of individualism into the unified whole of society, usually in a satiric manner but occasionally quite serious (in 2001, the individual is absorbed into the obelisk to further the evolution of our species). In the film's final moments, we discover that the entire movie was a flashback of sorts, played for the Supermechas just as the projectionist played the film for us. Just as we feed off of David's emotions, so too do the future mechas take his most personal memories and project them to their curious society. In the combination of two wildly different styles, scenes such as this provide the most honest look at the methods and ideas of both directors.

Yet for all of its intelligence, all of its jaw-dropping visual splendor -- perhaps Spielberg's always acute visual sense resonated even more than his work on other films because the images are put in service of some genuine meaning -- A.I. succeeds because of its protagonist. Haley Joel Osment is now remembered for whispering "I see dead people" and for not escaping the aftermath of Pay It Forward (his tiny adolescent body just didn't have the strength to push the rubble of that film's horrific collapse off himself), but his performance here never hits a false note. He is initially creepy and overbearing, but transitions effortlessly into an adorable boy who is as lovable, fragile and naïve as any other kid. Osment himself decided upon the excellent idea of never blinking to reveal his artificiality, a wry character tic that proves unexpectedly heartrending at the end when David, himself revived by the Mechas and given only a day with a reincarnation with his mother, lies in her arms and closes his eyes, off "to that place where dreams are born."