Like Stanley Kubrick's last (or, depending on how you count, previous) film, "Eyes Wide Shut," there were great expectations for "A.I.," a film Kubrick had been thinking about for 20 years and allegedly had storyboarded. He is also supposed to have tried to produce it with Steven Spielberg directing it. In that Spielberg is a third of the DreamWorks triumvirate, another director--not matter how revered--producing a film Spielberg was directing seems farfetched. For that matter, so does any affinity, let alone a collaboration between the often-sentimental Spielberg and the misanthropic anti-humanist Kubrick.

A story in which humans menace an innocent nonhuman "child" is a bridge across the seeming abyss between the immensely gifted directors. Spielberg has certainly dealt extensively with menaces to minorities, among others, a wizened extraterrestrial (E.T.), kidnapped Africans (Amistad), African American women (The Color Purple), Jews slated by the Nazis for destruction (Schindler's List), etc. Kubrick specialized in the disasters that befall control freaks: Humbert Humbert in "Lolita," much of the cast of "Dr. Strangelove," H.A.L. in "2001," Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," basic training staff in "Full Metal Jacket," Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut" (and, arguably Spartacus, the French general staff in "Paths of Glory," Barry Lyndon, and more.

Like "Eyes Wide Shut," "A.I." opened strong, garnered mixed reviews, and generated strong negative word of mouth. I think that the middle of "Eyes Wide Shut" is often ludicrous and mostly boring and that Tom Cruise's character is as vapid as Keir Dullea's in "2001", surpassing even Ryan O'Neal as Barry Lyndon. (However, I think that Nicole Kidman is very good in the ballroom at the beginning and in the toy store at the end of "Eyes.")

I think that "A.I." will be better appreciated in years to come. I also think that what is great about it is mostly Spielberg and what is bad about it is mostly Kubrick.

What seems to me to be most Kubrick is the engineer played (execrably) by William Hurt at the beginning and in the first of the three endings. He is totally without charm (so I guess that Hurt is perfectly cast!) and brimming over with hubris, a late-21st-century Dr. Frankenstein. He is pompously lecturing his subordinates about the breakthrough of creating a robot programmed to love, indifferent to whether the devotion is returned by the human. Looking back at that list of Kubrick films, there is not a lot of love on display: Humbert Humbert's obsessive pursuit of Lolita and Barry Lyndon's calculations about provoking involuntary responses from his female conquests, and what else? And both of those seem to me about self-gratification more than love. Rather than the fickleness of human love, a totally predictable, unwavering devotion would seem appealing to Kubrick's vision.

The main characters of the film are perfectly attentive (to women): David to the bereft mother, Gigolo Joe to his sexual partners. They do not pout or fail to perform, though they are mechanical, repeating what they are programmed to do.(1) Their mechanical simulations of feelings are forever fixed. Both of them are, in essence, evolved vibrators--the gigolo more obviously as a sex machine, David as vibrating the heart, both providing emotional gratification to women who do not receive (enough of) it from their human husbands.

After the engineer's prolog, there is a somewhat involving story of David helplessly imprinted on the bereaved mother whose son has been frozen. The son is (miraculously) cured and returns and manages to get his mechanical sibling into so much trouble that the mother agrees to return him to the factory to be destroyed (the imprinting programming not being reversible... don't ask! but remember all the irreversible love potions of earlier myths: that love is forever is not a radical break from the romantic tradition).

Instead, she send him into a woods (with his own trusty robot, a talking teddy bear), where some humans hunt down escaped or discarded mechs who are then destroyed for sport by humans at the peculiarly inappropriately named "Flesh Fair." The sadism of the resurrected brother and his friends fits with the spectacle of destroying "mechs" in an arena. Unlike other Spielberg films, flesh-and-blood boys are not innocent and brave but are dastardly. I suppose the spectacle of dismemberment and death could hearken back to the gladiator contests in "Spartacus," but there are very strong implications of genocide with the "orgs"(flesh-and-blood people) resenting and eager to destroy "mechs" (mechanical beings who have been programmed to be able to feel pain, to mother, and so on). The orgs and mechs are more like Nazis and Jews than Roman spectators and arena fodder, so I think this is Spielberg much more than Kubrick, including the confusion of being dumped in the darkening forest, the terror of the hunt, the transportation to the Flesh Fair arena, the desperation in the cage as the mechs wait to be destroyed for sport. . . and the salvation engineered by theteddy bear and a young girl. (The crowd is convinced that David is human and turn on the demolition derby entrepreneur for endangering one of their own kind.)

At which point David and the gigolo switch to a quest movie with strong echoes of "The Wizard of Oz." Instead of to the Emerald City, their quest takes them to the opposite color, a red-light city (Rouge City), a sort of futuristic capital of vice and bright lights that exaggerates Las Vegas. They find the (virtual) wizard, who is not revealed to be a fraud, though he certainly seems a charlatan.

I don't recall when or how the story of Pinnochio is first injected, but David wants to be transformed into being a real boy,(2) like that primitive wooden simulacrum of a boy once supposedly was. David must find the Blue Fairy, who is at the end of the world. He finds the end of the world and there is a succession of three endings, all three of which strike me as very Kubrickian, the last two of which provide closure of sorts. The first two are dazzlingly cinematic.

When I saw the film (more than a month ago) some of the audience left after the first of the endings, and I have talked to several people who wanted a more fairy tale ending ("and they lived happily ever after"). Perhaps Kubrick would have ended with one of the bleak first two. I might have been content with the second, but find the last one the most satisfying, even though it requires a lot of extra exposition. (Indeed, there is too much telling and not enough showing in the first and third thirds of the movie.)

Although David and Joe are officially not human, as played brilliantly by Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law, they are far more compelling than the supposedly human males, either the soulless technicians (William Hurt and Sam Robards) or the outright vicious children or the-search-and-deliver-to-public-destruction adults. The "mechs" are a mistreated minority, and the audience identifies with the "mechs" rather than with the inhumane (not to mention dull!) humans. The decks are completely stacked against sympathizing with our own species (with the partial exception of the devastated mother played by Frances O'Connor) and the artificiality of the artificial intelligence is obscured as we sympathize with the hunted-down mechs. Although I don't think that the film seriously explores issues of artificial intelligence or of growing up (which David can't and doesn't do), it does raise interesting questions about unrequited love, the central concern of western literature.

As I said, I think "A.I." will in the future be more highly valued by those who love films than it currently is.(3) It has some compelling and fascinating visuals and the very impressive performances of Law and Osment. At the very least, it is far more compelling--except musically--than any of Kubrick's last films, including "2001." Kubrick never figured out how to make the film and I think there is no reason to suppose he would have done as well, let alone better.

(I would be interested in the reactions by mothers to the film in general, and to the way children are used to provide emotional gratification in particular.)


NOTES

(1) William Hurt stresses that the new love machines can dream, but David can only lie still in bed and not sleep, so how can he dream?

(2) His experience with real boys was terrifying, but he seems to attribute that to being different (so, if only he could pass? like the Jewish boy among the Nazis in "Europa, Europa"?). He also fails to consider that the mother prefers her real son because he is of specifically her flesh and blood, not just that he is "real" and David is artificial.

(3) I also think that Spielberg will eventually be recognized more as an artist, not just a financially successful film-maker. His films have made so much money that he is widely resented, and he has been blamed for the blockbuster mentality even though that currently afflicts most arts in America. I think that Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple is overrated and Spielberg's film of it underrated, and his fascinating film "Empire of the Sun" is all but unknown. "Amistad" and "Saving Pvt. Ryan" (and "A.I.") are uneven, but they are complex, visually arresting films. (Full disclosure requires that I note that his film "Always" hit all the buttons that open my tear ducts.)



Recommended:
Yes

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