Movie of the Moment: A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Primal Screen

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Paul Arthur

A.I.'s best scene takes place in the womb. Having wended his way in a submersible helicopter through the detritus of the sunken amusement park, David stops in front of a plaster statue of the Blue Fairy. Trapped by a weblike collapsing Ferris wheel, he sits for an eternity, or until purgatory freezes over, begging her to "Make me into a real live boy. Make me real." It is a plaintively impossible request because David is a robot, and on another level, because he is a moving image, a stenciled pattern of light on a flat screen. No amount of wishing upon a star -- or in this case an idealized mother in the form of a Madonna icon that bears a sneaky resemblance to Audrey Hepburn's angel in Always -- can bridge the gap between illusion and reality. In this privileged moment, Spielberg admits to something he is frequently at pains to disavow: that movies are themselves robotic, artificial, suspended in time. (In 50 years Haley Joel Osment will be a senior citizen, but he will remain 12 years old in A.I., a boy who couldn't, not wouldn't, grow up). If falling short of a Kubrickian insight, it is as close to a gesture of resigned pessimism, a flaunting of ultimate limits, as we're likely to get from Spielberg. Needless to say, after a slow fade David is saved from repetitive limbo, this time to give birth to his own mother as loving simulacrum.

Spielberg is forever trying to transport us to some Other place: Neverland, Never Again Land, Dinoland, Fatherland (Hook, Saving Private Ryan, the Golden Age of studio directors), Founding Fatherland (Amistad), the Hereafter, Sea Word, the Third Word, now Futureworld. As invigorating and culturally symptomatic as certain of these excursions have been, the realm they ultimately refuse to inhabit is the Commonplace, the quotidian world of everyday life. This is doubly regrettable since Spielberg has shown an extraordinary grasp of how families interact, or rather fail to interact -- early scenes in E.T. and Close Encounters are brilliantly chaotic in their psychosocial dynamics. Call me crazy, but the project I'm waiting for, Spielberg's last frontier, would treat the family as something more, or less, than a metaphor, an instrument of personal psychodrama, or a launching pad to fantasy. Like David, I keep hoping for this deity of cinema to "make it real."

Paul Arthur wrote about The Circle in our March-April issue.