A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

Before we get into discussing exactly why "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" is a noble failure, I would like to take this opportunity to rescind everything snotty I have ever said about Haley Joel Osment. I have called him "Saint Haley," provided detailed analyses of his creepiness, and pointed to some urge he must have to tell us how to live, as expressed by his starring roles in "The Sixth Sense," "Pay It Forward," and this film when it was an upcoming attraction rather than top-billed.

Well, this film does in fact succeed at a number of things, and that success is primarily due to Haley Joel Osment. He provides a more nuanced portrayal of an artificial boy than any moviegoer has any right to expect, a performance so detailed and precise and atmospheric and real that it almost defies description. His posture, his facial expressions, and his vocabulary all mark him subtly throughout; even their change seems to serve to remind us that they're really staying the same, that this boy will always be a machine even as he becomes human. After all, is this not the challenge this film presents: how human can a machine be? And, similarly, how inhuman can humans be to a machine? Even as "A.I." becomes more and more bizarre, these questions stay in one's mind because Osment keeps putting them there.

Would that screenwriter/director Steven Spielberg were as committed to asking those questions. Unlike many of my fellow movie critics, I cannot profess any great enthusiasm for Spielberg's serious work, like "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." This is not because said films are not made with care, skill and passion. It is because even at the most dramatic moments of said films, one can feel Spielberg wanting the audience to feel exactly what he thinks they should feel. Sometimes this manifests itself by excessive sentiment, sometimes by excessive drama. Sometimes it even feels as if the acting in a certain scene is too good for the scene, like something in the scene is being plucked and offered up to us on a platter for our delectation, and he's put enough artistry into the film that it goddamn well better be delicious.

As you might guess, this tendency is all over "A.I." Many critics have discussed the fact that Stanley Kubrick originally intended to adapt this material, but passed it on to Spielberg after he passed on. I have not seen many of Kubrick's films, which is one of the reasons they will not let me be a real movie reviewer, but what I have seen suggests to me that Kubrick didn't really care one way or the other what the audience felt about the films he made. He pursued truth, and found beauty incidental to the pursuit. For all his obvious moral concern and filmmaking talent, Spielberg seems to think we won't appreciate truth which isn't draped in beauty. He almost refuses to estrange us from ourselves, even when it seems like the only cinematic option. Moral ugliness in "A.I." is confined to ugly humans; beauty is granted to those who are beautiful people. This film should unsettle us a lot more than it does, and the responsibility for its not doing so is all Spielberg's.

Admittedly, "A.I." aspires more to a fabular quality than pure realism. But some restraint is nevertheless in order. The scene in which Osment's adoptive mom breaks down and "imprints" him, thereby identifying her to his artificial intellect as his mommy, is well-played by Osment, whose sudden melting of posture and dialect nevertheless retains a certain stiffness. It is an ambiguous transformation at best; the ache has been satisfied, the power has been unleashed; what will come? But there is a little too much sunlight, a few too many cliches in the score, a bit too much of a halo around their embracing bodies for an attentive audience (which is the kind of audience that goes and sees films like this) to take the moment entirely seriously, even within the context of a fable. Nothing is this easy.

And there is one final question which no one involved in the film seems to have considered: What is love? Wouldn't we have to know what love is to consider the possibility of a machine loving a human, or a human loving a machine? This is not the kind of thing that anyone need address directly, of course; even one example of love in action, as it were, could set the stage adequately for a discussion of its (for lack of a better word) portability between human and machine. But I can't really understand why any machine could ever be shut out of the realm of love in Spielberg's universe. Spielberg, bless his heart and curse his filmmaking, thinks love is what happens when the sunlight shines and the music goes gooey.

BEN STERN VS. BRIAN ALDISS

After I sent out my review of "A.I.", Ben Stern, a longtime reader of the Spam-O-Matic, favored my inbox with the following discussion of the fictional materials by Brian Aldiss upon which said film was based. I was so impressed that I felt moved to retransmit it in full. It is through discussions such as this one that we can better appreciate where and why artistry is misapplied, and it is the evident passion in Stern's denunciation of the errors Aldiss commits that makes this discussion not only informative but damn enjoyable. We should all take time out of our respective days to thank our respective lucky stars that Ben, a true Renaissance man, has seen fit to provide us with this bounty.

By the way, I have left Stern's various curses in this discussion, as I felt it detracted from his prose to remove them. This is being noted not because I think you all are not mature enough to handle a little blue language, but because I normally run a profanity-free shop, and wanted to mute the surprise at the presence of the terms so you can admire Stern's use of them. This will serve as a warmup for the transcript of the Kevin Smith interview I conducted today, which will not be expurgated in any way, as expurgation would severly lower the word count of said interview. But more about that later. [The brackets below are Ben's as well.]

For what it's worth, I accidentally read the three stories that this was based upon. Kubrick's version was to be based upon the first, "Supertoys Last All Summer." To hear the author, Brian Aldiss, discuss it, Kubrick wanted to make the movie ask the same sort of questions as "2001," and failed nobly because Aldiss had allegedly written the story in an introspective point of view - looking in at humanity instead of looking outward at Man's Place in the Universe, and since Kubrick was such a one-story man, his little mind couldn't grasp the paradigm shift required. More than a tinge of bitterness creeps through Aldiss' introduction - one has the distinct impression that Aldiss was wounded by something Kubrick said about the story and where he wanted to take it, and Aldiss became overprotective of his child robot. He also mentions bitterly the fact that he sold it to Kubrick and assignees in perpetuity, as if someone were twisting his arm when he sold it. [I also note that Aldiss gleefully sold the next two stories to Spielberg under the exact same conditions, and doubtless complained all the way to the bank.]

Aldiss sort of dashed off the first story, presumably because he was feeling radically insecure at the time or something, and it's a plenty heavy-handed story on its own, sort of hitting you over the head every page with the pathos of a robot that thinks it's a real child who doesn't know why Mommy doesn't love it, and the oh-so-adorable talking teddy bear, named "Teddy." Mercifully, the damn thing is only about 10 or 15 pages long, in book form, and ends without the robot learning much of anything at all.

He continues in "Supertoys When Winter Comes," which takes any possibility of subtlety that was still present in the first story and proceeds to systematically destroy it, to the point of a scene towards the end where the child is told bluntly that it's a robot, after it is made abundantly clear that the father figure is cheating on the mother figure and the whole family, save only the damn robot, is without love. Even Teddy's love seems forced - which is possibly the only skillful bit of writing in the entire sequence of short stories. The child, in an effort to see if it truly is a robot, dismantles the teddy bear (aw, with the teddy bear's permission, isn't that sweet), since it is convinced that it is exactly as alive as this bizarre talking bear. Finding that the bear is a robot, the child goes batshit, breaking its face open on the power grid for the house, which conveniently powers down and dematerializes the house while the mother is on a flight of stairs. In an expectable attempt at irony, the fall kills her. Aldiss ends the story with the robot examining a dying rose that used to appear to be part of a healthy rosebush, and thinking how roses reminded it of Mommy. How sweet. Or something.

Not content, Aldiss writes the (thankfully) last story in the series, "Supertoys in Other Seasons." He mercifully abandons the parallelism he had started in SWWC (the first two stories have identical first paragraph construction, in an "Oh I'm so clever" way). Instead, he shows the father figure blinded by greed and sex and you name it, and then learning the error of his ways when he suddenly receives his comeuppance and manages to go through all of the money in his golden parachute. Realizing how badly he had treated his wife, he attempts to make amends by loving the poor robot, which he magically finds in some junkyard town it had made its way to. He simply upgrades the damn thing to a new processor, moves the memories over, presumably destroys the original host body (which obviously is not worthy of love, since he has a backup copy), and nervously brings the new robot to life. He happened to have cared so much (read this as sarcastically as you like) that he built the new model by hand, in a factory he somehow still happened to own despite being down and out, rather than using the machines designed for precisely the task he was about to undertake, so he has his doubts as to whether the new system would power up. But the robot does indeed work, and the first thing it sees is a new model of the damn bear, which has also gotten all of its old memories implanted. The trauma of discovering that it was a robot somehow forgotten, the fucking thing finally feels loved.

So the long and the short of it is that although it is indeed Spielberg's fault if the movie comes off heavy-handed, since he could either have tried harder to fix it, or realized what a crock of shit the stories were and simply kissed the money goodbye, rather than wasting more, he had plenty of hamfistedness to work with in the original material, and one can almost see Aldiss standing next to Spielberg as the cameras were rolling, urging him to even greater expanses of bluntness. [That said, I have not seen AI, and got the impression from Aldiss' limited comments in the introduction to the stories that although he was happier with Spielberg's vision than with Kubrick's, he felt that Spielberg had also changed his little robot child into something it wasn't. Or maybe he just thought it was too subtle or something, who knows?]

Ben

who hated the stories a lot, and therefore plans never to see AI, nor read anything by Brian Aldiss again.

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