R.I.P. Ivan K. Goldberg, M.D.

Psychiatrist bridged worlds of talk-therapy psychiatry and medication-centered practice

[Edits 11/30/13. Edit 12/2/13. 12/3/13: here is some online obituary information. More edits 12/6/13. Edits 1/22/14.]

I was informed by an e-mail that I received this morning that Ivan K. Goldberg, M.D., had passed away on November 26. According to Linda Boginsky, the longtime arranger of educational lectures for DBSA Morristown Area, the cause was cancer, which had apparently gotten quite pervasive before it was detected (or rigorously treated). He was 79.

Dr. Goldberg was a psychiatrist who had experience in doing medical scholarship (some academic/research articles of his from 1980, in the journal The Lancet, can be found in a PubMed search [End note 1]); serving for many years as a professor in a medical school; serving on the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); doing private practice for many years (in Manhattan as well as outside it); and functioning as an advocate for patient self-support efforts, particularly DBSA (Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance). He also maintained a general-information Web site, viewable here.

It was in his patient-advocacy role that I got to see Dr. Goldberg give several of his informational lectures that he routinely gave at DBSA Morristown Area (which had had a previous name prior to late 2002). His lecture service to this group had gone on since 1987, shortly after its inception in 1986 (according to Ms. Boginsky). He also served as the professional advisor to the New York chapter of DBSA in Manhattan, and he had a column in its periodic newsletter.

I was also fortunate to arrange to get him to lecture in Sussex County, N.J., no fewer than three times—in 2003, 2005, and 2006. The first time (2003) was under the aegis of both DBSA Sussex County and NAMI Sussex, and the second times were under NAMI Sussex. Nick Poth, who started the Sussex County DBSA group, had first had Dr. Goldberg speak in Sussex County in about 1992, from what I heard.

The information commonly given on his career in the periodically updated lecture schedule of DBSA Morristown Area has been that he was retired from the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians at Columbia University (where he worked for 30+ years); and that he had been on the staff of NIMH. DBSA Morristown Area also noted he had authored Questions and Answers About Depression and Its Treatment (which, as I found, was published by The Charles Press, a small Philadelphia publisher, in 1993), and a second edition was in progress (this was never published, to my knowledge, though a manuscript circulated among close associates).

Dr. Goldberg, who got his M.D. in about 1960, not only kept abreast of most recent medical studies, partly in order to offer patients and the public “the latest science” relevant to psychiatric treatment. He also had trained when psychiatrists were still schooled in Freudian talking therapy, with one result that he could relate an old anecdote from an “old-timer” in the Freudian school who had apparently trained in Vienna (or Berlin--my confusion on which), who once said, “Ach, you Americans say sensitive, when you really should say neurotic.”

Dr. Goldberg maintained a sensitivity to patient perspective—such as self-reports, or the fact that psychiatric issues are first established in doctor assessment by appreciating what a patient has to reveal—that came from his Freudian training. Thus he could not just show an appreciation for how patients interpret their problems (such as along the lines of reports suggesting past trauma), but align this in his own way with the current discipline of medication-based treatment.

To put it in my own terms, Dr. Goldberg didn’t just regard patients as piles of gravel to be assessed by a time-server with an idiot checklist, to be made to toe the line of the prerogatives of Big Pharma; he also took into significant account what a patient had to report as helping define the specific the problem that patient had, and he responded with compassion defining his treatment approach.

A good example of this general approach was shown in his describing the phenomenon of borderline personality disorder, in the first lecture I had him give, with my having requested he address the topic of borderline PD. In the same event, he spoke (conforming with a multi-topic format he frequently used in Morristown) also on other interconnected topics (adding one or two of his own), in the special lecture I set up for him on behalf of DBSA Sussex County and NAMI Sussex at Newton Memorial Hospital, Newton, N.J., on June 6, 2003. (End note 2)

Among other things on borderline PD, he said (and note what he says on interpersonal relations between borderlines and their friends):

The other thing that’s sort of so difficult when dealing with borderline people is their capacity to upset others. As kind of a survival skill...from their early traumatic childhoods, they’ve learned all kinds of emotional techniques that basically get under the skin of other people and make other people sort of impotently furious in many cases. So a good deal of anger is generally expressed by such folks [borderlines]—they can rapidly alternate between loving you and hating you. You have someone who has apparently been your best friend for a long, long time, and then suddenly, over what appears to you to be an absolutely trivial incident, ...you're at the top of their shit list.

After this statement, he added (with semi-apologetic humor; this paraphrases), “You may not use the term shit list, but I’m from New York, and that’s how we talk.” I have this whole statement and much of the rest of his lecture from June 2003 on audiotape, which of course he knew I was making.

Dr. Goldberg showed a healthy middle ground between talk-therapy sensitivity and medication-related science. He could employ Jewish-related jokes in his lectures, but he was not ethnocentric; he showed good American, science-oriented sense. He seemed quite abreast of “the latest and greatest” findings on what meds worked, or did not, well into his old age.

His healthy alienation from the current U.S. practice of corporate medical marketing was shown in his Web site’s noting that it did not take money from Big Pharma. Also, he remarked (more than once) that the trend of psychiatric medications’ being marketed as Big Pharma does uses the same practice/mentality as the selling of soap.

He even drove himself to Sussex County when he lectured, including the last time he came, in 2006. I last saw him this past June in Morristown, speaking in a DBSA lecture where he shared the stage with Dr. Howard Rudominer.

End note 1.

Enter "goldberg ik" into the search box on PubMed. In results, you should see three studies from 1980, dealing with depression treatment.

End note 2.

Added 12/6/13. Not only did I make an effort to arrange educational lectures within my home county in 2002-07, but corresponding with scholarly psychiatrists was something I'd done for many years. Here is the first letter I received from Ross J. Baldessarini, M.D., a top researcher at Harvard Medical School with whom I corresponded from 1990 through about 2005. 

Movie break (Quick Vu*): Spielberg settles Kubrick’s estate, and makes a weird blend of summary/unfinished and mixed-tones fairy tale: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Subsections below:

A tale of two directors setting up the production direction for this film

Spielberg’s production efficiency makes the film both quick and idea-rich, if not hectic

The meandering history of the story sheds some light

The success and esthetic of Star Wars set up challenges for Kubrick

Allusions to Kubrick’s films in this one

Is this estate-settling effective? What does it leave us with?

Near the very end of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), when the Harford family is in a sumptuous toy store (which seems to have been a real store in England used as a set in the film), the young daughter Helena picks up a large teddy bear from a beautiful display of several of them. This vignette almost seems a signpost for what might have been Kubrick’s last production, if he hadn’t died days after finishing EWS for his studio Warner Brothers. Whether this shocking turn was (to put it in somewhat cool terms) fortunate or unfortunate for the huge project that remained in his pipeline is not at all clear.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence sometimes get scorned in line with the notion that it’s a Steven Spielberg film; one review noted in its Wikipedia article speaks as if this was Spielberg’s first boring film. If you took it only as a Spielberg film, I think that if you like his Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; see my review of it, starting here) and you like his Minority Report (2002), which was released immediately after A.I. (and which I, incidentally, like better than A.I.), you would find A.I. definitely worth a look.

But I think the most important thing to note about this film, to appreciate it—in all its flawed nature, and it has numerous flaws—is that you have to understand its preproduction history. (I remarked cursorily about this history last year in my review of CE3K [End note 1]). It is an important installment in Kubrick’s series of projects (see my little rundown on his career here). It was a project he worked on for decades. There is some (from my perspective) fraught information on whether Kubrick had fully transferred the project into Spielberg’s hands before he died (the two-disk A.I. DVD, along with information on the ~2007 Eyes Wide Shut DVD, suggests the transfer was not made).

A tale of two directors setting up the production direction for this film

Kubrick and Spielberg had talked about the project (usually on the phone) over some years, and Kubrick had thought Spielberg would be ideal to direct it, while Kubrick could produce. Meanwhile, Spielberg thought Kubrick should really direct it (End note 2). (These facts are related on an A.I. disk extra [on the first disk].) When Kubrick died, it is not hard to hypothesize that, after Kubrick died, Warner Brothers wanted to somehow bring the project to fruition, after having put money into it for preproduction over many years. Warners had been Kubrick’s distributing studio since 1971 and his A Clockwork Orange, and had floated financing for him to use in England while running his own independent production facility. In this regard, Kubrick in the latter three decades of his career had been a sort of “indie” director with a long-term bankrolling and distribution deal with the major studio of Warners.

Terry Semel, a studio head at Warners who had worked closely with Kubrick, had felt that a movie made under the aegis of both Kubrick and Spielberg would have been a winner (this paraphrases a remark made on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD). But once it was Spielberg who was making A.I., Spielberg was hard-pressed in a couple ways; working not only for Warners but for his own firm of DreamWorks LLC, he was on a tight production schedule. He wrote the script himself (on which, more below) and wrote it to a good extent with an eye to what the production would be (from costumes and props to scenery CGI, presumably)—a sort of Ridley Scott way to direct, more from an art production standpoint than from a strictly script/story standpoint. The shoot was 67 days, which tended to force the proceedings along (such as leaving performances on the spontaneous side—a departure from how it would probably have come out under Kubrick’s direction). Through all this, as Spielberg says (this may paraphrase a bit, and extracts from an elaborate set of comments), “My job was to honor Stanley’s intentions while not forgetting myself.” (End note 3)

The result is, I would argue, two things:

* a film that is heavy on special effects and keeps you interested with the spectacle (which may, today and in the future, lend it to use in film schools for special-effects classes, and which may be why, historically, it was an early-ish example of an American film that did better box office overseas than in the U.S. [according to the film’s Wikipedia article]); this while its overall story may be not entirely gripping or resounding with middle-class audiences, or may tend to fray into not-entirely-credible strangeness toward the end; and

* a matter of a man with the wherewithal (Spielberg) helping settle the estate of a recently deceased friend (Kubrick) with the result that, yes, some old wishes and ideas were hammered into some kind of fruition, but somehow the result is not what the deceased person would have made himself, but which at this point may be “the breaks” when it comes to estate-settling anyway.

Spielberg’s production efficiency makes the film both quick and idea-rich, if not hectic

Kubrick was elderly by 1999, and his year-plus shoot of Eyes Wide Shut (see my two-part review of this starting here) plus its post-production may have been overly taxing for him. A colleague of his from many years before opined after his death that this last film, in effect, killed him (this is said somewhere in the oral history of Peter Bogdanovich, “What They Say About Stanley Kubrick,” The New York Times Magazine [July 4, 1999], pp. 18-25, 40, 47, 48). A.I. seems as if, just by virtue of the many ideas in it (conceptual and visual), it would have taken much longer for Kubrick to make, once he was in production, than did Eyes Wide Shut (End note 4).

Even if you consider that a lot of preproduction was already done (such as visual ideas rendered by graphic artist Chris Baker, as noted in an A.I. DVD extra), getting the performances down on film (under Kubrick) might have taken at least as long as had been the case with Eyes. This, of course, might have made for a (performance-wise) strangely static A.I., or perhaps not. In any event, for Kubrick as a man in his early seventies, this may not have been the film for him. A younger Spielberg, who was in his early fifties (or maybe an even younger director), would generally have been better.

In any event, the fact that A.I. was hustled through in production compared to Eyes seems to add some Spielbergian zip to the film, which quality seems suited to the sense of adventure and the youth-of-sorts at its center. Then, if we are rather bored or vexed by some of the film’s ideas passing by as if on a long circus train, at least the film keeps moving.

The net result is like a big deck of cards—or almost like a flashing-by series of the many storyboards that Kubrick had generated, which he had had Spielberg examine (Spielberg says there were “almost one thousand”), according to an extra on the A.I. DVD: you are exposed to these in rapid sequence, and you might say, “Gee, there are some intriguing little ideas here, but how did this weird story start being pursued in the first place?”

The meandering history of the story sheds some light

The story history, interestingly, is traced in good part on the two-disk DVD for Eyes Wide Shut, where it becomes clear that both films were in preproduction (at least for a time in the 1990s) in some parallel fashion—and then Eyes was in production and in “post,” from late 1997 to early 1999, while A.I. was still lingering in some state of preproduction. It may or may not be because of this that there are some parallel thematic features in both films, in a very general sense: a focus on love, and mixing in some risque stuff with the more PG-friendly treatment of love. (One example in A.I. is having the character of Gigolo Joe be boy-robot David’s companion on the road, which I think, despite the unfinished quality to this, is one of the better touches of A.I.—in fact, the Gigolo Joe character, all sexually related sniggering aside, especially as played in smooth/jaunty fashion by Jude Law, is a fine touch to the film—a variation on the cliché of the “hooker with a heart of gold.”)

Kubrick first encountered the story, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” by British writer Brian Aldiss, by the early 1970s. About a robot boy who has a robot teddy bear, it appealed enough to Kubrick that it became the kernel of a film story that would occupy him (off and on) for the next almost-30 years. My own opinion is that the Teddy/David part of the finished film, while admittedly a bit cute (and attracting derision such as one female viewer’s opinion I saw on the Internet years ago, who took issue with seemingly every main feature of the film, including that Teddy was like Snuggles the fabric-softener teddy bear), is the best part, or one of the best parts, of the film—most consistently touching, and providing a fairly simplifying narrative anchor.

Somewhat aside from this, the idea that a robot boy is eager to please his mother, and can’t quite do it, and meanwhile gets rather machine-voice-like advice from his robot teddy, has a potential to configure a fairly substantial story of alienation and longing, in line with Kubrick’s other existentialist-type stories. (This story outline was in place, at Kubrick’s hand, before A.I. was made; see “The Masterpiece a Master Couldn’t Get Right,” The New York Times [July 18, 1999], arts section, pp. 9, 22.)

While working with Kubrick, Aldiss started getting disenchanted with the project—to judge from his comments on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD—when Kubrick started gravitating to including elements of the “Blue Fairy” component of the Pinnochio story. I agree with him; this is one thing that turns me off a lot in A.I.

Spielberg—who is the “full author” of only one of his other films, CE3K (though there has been controversy about who else contributed to the script for that one)—wrote the script for A.I. in a way of boiling down the plethora of earlier-generated ideas and potential narrative directions into a shootable script. There had been a 90-page treatment (a sort of screenplay summary) by Ian Watson, according to Spielberg on the A.I. DVD (Watson is also quoted from [on a few issues] in an extra on the two-disk Eyes Wide Shut DVD). Watson is credited in the A.I. end titles as having done the story meant for the film on which the screenplay, by Spielberg, is based. The film credits showing the story genesis, of course, boils things down a good bit. The Eyes Wide Shut DVD reveals that other writers were tapped to work on A.I.; and who knows how many of their ideas ended up in the film.

In any event, Spielberg wrote a sort of digest of the burgeoning ideas accumulated for the film, as lay in the material Kubrick left behind after his death. Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and longtime producing partner, said Spielberg presented the essential nature of the Kubrick script while he made “hundreds” of changes, according to the A.I. DVD (though one can assume they were minor; Harlan says “Stanley would have liked” what Spielberg had wrought).

This boils down the way the film came about from certain development angles and a lot of unfinished business. (This process helps explain why sometimes thematic ideas  seem evocative and elegant, if very generally formulated, as in the early scene with William Hurt’s Professor Hobby, a Bill Gates-like character, delivering a proposal to a design team—and yet other ideas seem not well thought through. For instance, it is mentioned that robots were made, to serve humans, because they consumed no more resources than it took to make them; but [we can easily ask] they have to run on battery power, so where does the material for that come from? Don’t batteries have to be replaced, or recharged? Especially if a robot lives indefinitely, as the film later implies they do?)

The success and esthetic of Star Wars set up challenges for Kubrick

Another source for this film was the trend in mainstream movies toward fantasy and a sort of pulp esthetic. Apparently Star Wars (1977) impressed Kubrick enough—though not in an entirely positive way; he thought his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) handled an outer space story better—that he felt it aimed in a direction he could go for future work. This isn’t to say Kubrick felt a kinship with the obviously pulp-ish storytelling of George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise. One thing that made 2001 a landmark is that it was a science fiction story that—aside from its narrative structure, which left some viewers puzzled (at its release)—tried to be as realistic in its detail-level story parts as possible. Weightlessness, and floating out in space, had to be as in real life.

This hit a “sweet spot” with culture-consuming audiences all the more as the U.S. space program was going great guns in the 1960s. Our first manned moon landing was in 1969. Flights to orbit the Earth had been going on since before the release of 2001. If actual achievements in space travel were seeming to bring to reality what had once been fantastic, Kubrick’s film 2001 brought the premises of “fantasy”—any motion-picture storytelling—to a new, impressive level of realism. We could behold what it was like to travel in space in his film, just as the U.S. was actually having men do this, with the grainy pictures sending back a real-life window on that, while Kubrick’s film gave us a fictional “window” giving us a high-fidelity view.

Starting in 1977, and after the more creepily realistic likes of Silent Running (1971) and other sci-fi outings influenced by 2001, the appetite of moviegoers, when it came to outer-space pictures, was more for obvious fantasy. Leaving aside Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which heralded strains of filmmaking of a somewhat different sort (both Scott’s own illustrious career and the less-flighty-than-fantasy genre of horror as a way to adapt outer-space stories), Star Wars heralded a big new strain in filmmaking: appealing to young tastes, and the fantasy fan base. I won’t delve into this area too deeply here, but assume it’s fairly widely understood (End note 5).

Kubrick, one can today assume, was under the gun with his business arrangement with Warners (starting in about 1971) to make profitable films that, even if original, still appealed to a broad audience (and brought in a box-office windfall). So, he seemed to have felt he could ride on the coattails of the Star Wars “opening” to a new genre of filmmaking for him to try. As he said to Brian Aldiss (this paraphrases something said within the Eyes Wide Shut DVD), he wondered how he could capitalize on the success of Star Wars, or such, and still retain his reputation for social responsibility.

The amount of fantasy-like elements and sheer spectacle in A.I.—which goes beyond the relatively more button-down spectacle of 2001—seems to echo a Star Wars esthetic. But there is not a whole lot of cuteness here (except for the Blue Fairy stuff, which seems more a miscalculation than a winning, story-integrated element of cuteness). There is no C3PO or Chewbacca, no Harrison Ford playing an acerbic Han Solo. No Princess Leia [sp?] with hairstyle including parts like two cinnamon buns on the sides of her head; no quotable cheese like “The Force be with you.” We movie buffs on different sides of the genre divide can agree to disagree; Star Wars fans will forever savor their fare, and they may say I can have my “bleak” Kubrick.

But it’s strange to think that, if A.I. represents a sort of historical threshold between (1) the greater realism, among the best directors, of the 1960s-70s and (2) the more fantasy-oriented work running so hot and heavy in the past 10-12 years, A.I. seems a stillborn example of fantasy-oriented sci-fi work. True, it seems, judging from a comparison of the Wikipedia articles for Eyes Wide Shut and for A.I., that A.I. attracts more attention. At least, more Internet-savvy geeks are apt to work on Wikipedia articles, we can assume, and more of them will be fans of A.I. And as I’ve suggested, if you like Spielberg’s more sci-fi/space stuff—and also if you eat up everything done by Kubrick—you should check out A.I.

But of Kubrick’s latest films, I prefer Eyes Wide Shut; even if EWS seems a little slow at times, and is a little pretentious or overdone at points, its deliberate swim through a colorful, if rarefied, world and its sense of a flowingly unified “odyssey” suits it. The privileged echelons of New York City, and the strangely emotionally mixed time of Christmas, seem well handled by Kubrick’s detail-focused, methodical style. This same method might not have worked well for A.I., at all.

Allusions to Kubrick’s films in this one

It would be interesting to discuss some of the details of A.I., but I’ll limit myself to something you can make a sort of parlor game: identifying the visual (and occasionally verbal) allusions to some of Kubrick’s films in A.I. (Some of Spielberg’s films—and his DreamWorks logo—are alluded to also, to judge from critical response, but this is less frequent: for instance, E.T. [1982] seems to be echoed a bit, and more definitely Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977] get a nod, as with the thin, faceless robot figures near the end of A.I.)

* The shots of the family’s modernistic auto, from a low angle and the camera tracking along, alludes to shots of Danny on his Big Wheel in The Shining (1980). Later, a shot of David and his mother (played by Frances O’Connor [URL to come]) in the same car, with the camera focusing on the mother’s teary-eyed face as they say something about whether David eats, echoes the shot in The Shining when Jack is driving the Torrance family in the VW, and Jack says that Danny should have eaten his breakfast.

* A shot at the family dinner table through a circular light fixture echoes a shot in Dr. Strangelove (1964), looking down at a meeting table through a circular light fixture. (The father in A.I. is played by Sam Robards.)

* A shot of David, his mother, and the mother’s natural son in a boat, with a colorful umbrella over it, alludes to Barry Lyndon (1975), where not only are there pastoral scenes, but a certain obvious color-balancing scheme is going on.

* A shot of Gigolo Joe’s face filling the screen, the first time we see him, echoes a shot of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) when we first see him.

* A shot of the family’s natural son is his cryogenically-freezing holding cell, face showing through a window, echoes a shot of astronauts in similar enclosures in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

* Teddy’s repeatedly making mechanical-sounding remarks/questions about David as the Flesh Fair worker carries Teddy to the lost and found is similar to the spaceship computer HAL talking nervously and repeating appeals to the astronaut Dave near the end of 2001.

* The way the film jumps in time, after David has gotten buried under the underwater carnival structure near the Coney Island statue of the Blue Fairy, to a point well into the future, with a spaceship or such flying along over ice, echoes the time-jumps in 2001 (though this is more a plot device that Kubrick most probably built into the film when he was developing it before Spielberg started making it). The flying over the ice may seem similar to a shot of a spaceship flying over the Moon in 2001.

* Near the end of A.I., the brief shot of David’s face in a sort of color-treated exposure echoes astronaut Dave’s transmogrification (with focus on his face) near the end of 2001, during and/or immediately after the latter film’s light show. And much about the late scene in A.I. where the boy-robot David is in a reconstituted “situation” (are we just witnessing his “mental experience,” or is this physically going on?) while he is “back home,” where he will find his mother—this all echoes the way the astronaut Dave (in 2001) ends up in a white, old-styled bedroom/parlor of some kind. This latter scene, interpreters of 2001 have held out, was a depiction of the inside of his mind, not really his being physically somewhere new.

The whole late sequence of A.I. with David being reunited with his mother may well have been a plot device originally planned by Kubrick (whether consciously echoing his 2001 or not). In fact, Spielberg has said (according to the film’s Wikipedia page—see the subsection “Critical response,” where reference is to Spielberg’s talking with critic Joe Leydon in 2002) that all the sort of material (presumably with its sentimental patina) that people thought was by himself was actually written by Kubrick, not by Spielberg. Spielberg said, for instance (in Wikipedia subsection just noted), “[A]ll the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley's were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley's.”

##

As I go through all these details, I am reminded again of the clearly mixed pluses and minuses of A.I. It seems more for fans of Kubrick, in a way (and maybe of Spielberg), than for others who are more casually interested in Kubrick and/or who are not enamored of science fiction.

Is this estate-settling effective? What does it leave us with?

And with Spielberg having put A.I. on the production fast track, we may get a detailed story flushed out of Kubrick’s production pipeline—like someone settling an estate and discovering and publishing one last Salinger novel (or a biographer’s unpublished “life of” Salinger, which had been blocked with threats of a lawsuit by the old coot and is now relegated to selling in an auction by Sotheby’s). The old silverware is put into an estate sale; the records of grand old fun times are released from the cobwebbed confines of Old Onkel Gustav’s castle after his death, and the world gets a glimpse of Citizen Kane–like, cathedral-like richness (or not quite). But who could have made the passed-on soldier’s “plans and wisdom” into a work of art? Could Onkel Gustav, if he had lived another few years, have even pulled it off? Or would it have been just a dry deck of merely curious tarot cards even if he had made it?

In any event, A.I. is a deck of colorful cards, brought to light by Spielberg, originally designed—by a host of people—under Kubrick’s hopeful direction, and giving (if nothing else) an evening’s eye-candy entertainment. But could the deck of cards have been more than that: could they have been life? Or the closest to life that art gets?

Maybe the hint is that Teddy is the only main character alive at the end of the film, after David and his mother—in some strange semi- or entirely-electronic-fantasy sequence—have died. What will Teddy do next? Can a toy teddy bear live without his companion boy (even if the boy is a robot)?

If one existential question of 20^th-century literature was “Where are the snows of yesteryear?,” then it seems A.I. poses us the question, “Whither goes the bereft mechanical teddy bear of tomorrow?”

Is this the question the film went to all its effort to leave us with?

Spielberg’s version of Minority Report (2002), I think, is a better film, made just after this one.

##

* “Quick Vu,” whether denoted here or on my other blog, usually means that I give a review based on only a single, recent viewing; or based on memories of past viewing(s); or based on cursory or otherwise distracted viewings. Another, more recent criterion is that, though I may have seen the movie several times, and like or value it, I choose to be rather cursory with a review, for perhaps practical reasons.

End note 1.

Here is what I said in Part 2 of my review of CE3K:

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). The only film he directed, in addition to CE3K, that Spielberg also wrote the screenplay for, though this film was really authored by Stanley Kubrick, who had been developing it for years. Kubrick had commissioned several writers over a long period to develop the treatment (summary/outline of the story), and the treatment as described in a 1999 news story is what this film brought to fruition. Spielberg’s screenplay was putting meat on the bones of the treatment to have a shootable script. See “The Masterpiece a Master Couldn’t Get Right,” The New York Times (July 18, 1999), arts section, pp. 9, 22. This film includes visual and verbal stylistic touches that echo or allude to films of Kubrick (e.g., The Shining, 2001, and Barry Lyndon) and films of Spielberg (such as E.T.). Apparently misunderstood by some as a kind of “endorsement” of child abandonment, it actually is an unusual and touching look at alienation in a child, though the child of the story is a robot. This film and CE3K and the subsequent Minority Report are worth considering as a trio, as Spielberg’s more mature attempts to deal with sci fi themes.

End note 2.

In a complex set of comments that seem nevertheless sincere, Spielberg says on the A.I. DVD that he would much rather have had Kubrick direct the film, but that once Kubrick had died, Spielberg undertook the project (1) to tell a good story (he had originally responded to the story as if it was one of Kubrick’s best, apparently when he first read a treatment in 1984), and (2) to pay tribute to Kubrick (more regarding the latter’s career).

End note 3.

Information on the script comes, for one source, from the promotional cardboard enclosure with the two-disk A.I. DVD, where it notes that Spielberg did the script in two months. Promotional copy on the enclosure says, “Though the production was limited in prep and production time, the fact that Spielberg penned the script helped streamline the technical demands.” As to the tones and story values of both Kubrick and Spielberg, the enclosure says, quoting Spielberg producing partner Kathleen Kennedy, “Part of Kubrick’s vision was to create a futuristic character in David that traveled from the intellect to the heart. And I think Steven Spielberg works from the heart and goes to the intellect. It’s quite a beautiful combination.”

End note 4.

You can find references to A.I.—to get hints of how it and EWS were worked on somewhat simultaneously—in Part 1 of my review of Eyes Wide Shut; see End notes 1a, 5, 6, 7a, and 10 (third paragraph)—especially 5 and 7a.

End note 5.

The shift from 1970s realism and pessimism in film stories and techniques yielded to strains of filmmaking that, for author Peter Biskind, were epitomized, not entirely winningly to Biskind, by the directors Spielberg and George Lucas, in his Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Here, when the turn to the Spielberg/Lucas style is remarked on, he quotes someone derisively referring to the new movement as “twerp” cinema.

Movie break (Quick Vu): Yutzing around in California wine country: Sideways (2004)

Life is tragic to those who think, and comic to those who feel.

—source unknown to me; cited often enough by lit professors and such (I hope I quoted it right)

Subsections below:

Two men, one divorced and one a bachelor (not for long), are front and center

Two unattached women enter the mix

A languorous moment of melancholy makes a rich but isolated appearance

A final fling shows how bad the hi-jinks can get

A restoration of seriousness comes with promise

[Edits 11/9/13. Edit 11/22/13.]

Not that I want to fart in the face of fans of this film [too much alliteration?], but I am keeping this review short partly because I haven’t been able to study it as I’d like. It is also—while arguably Payne’s most entertaining film of the past ~12 years—entertaining in a definitely shallowly fun way.

The general idea of the story, based on a novel by Rex Pickett, to me is symbolized by one scene when main characters Miles and Jack are (on their road trip) at a vineyard location, and when Miles has found from the more bumptious Jack that Miles’ ex-wife and her new husband are going to be at Jack’s wedding (the big inevitable “goal scene” of this film), and that Jack has been talking to Miles’ ex-wife…Miles gets so suddenly incensed—he and Jack are buddies from college—that, quite contrary to how he usually is with wine (which is an urbane, tasting-skilled connoisseur), Miles gets out of the car, grabs a bottle of wine from the back seat, yanks off the already-loose cork with his teeth, and heads off with impulsive, trundling abandon down a steep hillside, drinking the wine from the bottle like a dopey souse.

This film, in short, is Payne’s chance to do something about as basic and fun-grabbing, with maybe predictable results for its characters in terms of the consequences of short-term (and shortsighted) thrills. There are both elements of a sophomoric bacchanal (especially on Jack’s part) and a long weekend of effete wine-sampling (which Miles is trying to school Jack in).

Director Alexander Payne here works with screenwriting partner Jim Taylor and other associates such as coproducer George Parra and editor Kevin Tent (a making-of doc in the DVD for The Descendants shows his array of long-term associates, some going back to his earliest films). Phedon Papamichael (the first name is pronounced “FAY-don,” according to a Sideways DVD comment) is director of photography here, and seems good at shooting outdoors and sun-sprayed scenes, with occasional filters, for a sort of hazy/friendly color look—Payne says he wanted a “pastel”-like “’70s film feel.” (One shot, of the two men’s red car going into a highway tunnel that I think is near Santa Barbara, is reminiscent of a similar shot in The Graduate [1967].) Whether indoors or out, the look seems to be perfectly suited to a friendly, wandering time in wine country; sometimes you get a sense the film wants you to feel as if you’re watching a dream.

Two men, one divorced and one a bachelor (not for long), are front and center

Miles, played by lovable hangdog-looking Paul Giamatti, is a struggling writer (and English teacher, his source of pay), whose large novel is being handled by an agent, who has most lately submitted it to a small press, with word of acceptance not yet received. Miles, whose depressive side is readily and acceptably enough commented on by his college-era chum Jack (Thomas Haden Church), has enough of an “accepting of fate” streak that he is about as ready to accept the failure of his novel to be published as he can be (which means, not 100 percent; “I have stopped caring,” he claims at one point, but later we’ll find he still cares, in petulant terms).

Jack, a not-always-employed actor, often wears loud shirts, untucked, and has tousled, somewhat unkempt reddish hair and appears in Haden Church’s form like a Mick Jagger (if he danced as if with scorpions in his pants, that would complete the impression you get)—while Giamatti in during-the-film commentary says a few times he looks like a “young Lee Marvin.” Jack is going to get married on a coming Saturday, and for the ongoing week, he and Miles are going to have a sort of weeklong “bachelor party” of a vacation time on the road—to wine country, to play golf…and, as Jack is hungriest for, an affair before such a thing will be (theoretically) preempted for him by marriage.

The premises are fairly simple. The struggling, stoical writer and the semi-working, outgoing, randy actor are embarking on a road trip, and their quest (hardly an original idea, but OK for this film) of a vacation that celebrates the man about to get married and have a sort of last big bout of fun before the knot is tied also is an “odd couple” story. And they represent two archetypes: one, Miles, is the serious, discriminating, tartly humorous intellectual, here played with enough vinegar yet enough sensible-to-us perspective by Giamatti, as might really “cramp the style” of partying types Miles might be with. Miles is like any range of fictional literary figures, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Pynchon’s rather lugubrious Charles Mason. Meanwhile, as for Jack, the fun-loving “big child” whose pursuit of a last fling (of the type some of us did when they were reckless frat boys [End note]) leads him into riotous unforeseen consequences—he is like a still-young Falstaff, or Pynchon’s bibulous Jeremiah Dixon.

Miles has a “clinical” side, too; he admits he takes Xanax (an anti-anxiety med) and Lexapro (an antidepressant); there is a passing remark about his helping his psychologist with the other man’s computer. Also, there are mentions through the film of Vicodin (I don’t know who takes it or, if under a doctor’s care, why). Miles usually drinks wine in some kind of moderation related to his tasting side; but on occasion, he drinks too much, showing his ongoing melancholy. The film doesn’t really look at how this aptness to occasionally overindulge in alcohol might be a bad mix with his using psych meds (and anyway, we don’t watch this kind of film for that kind of sage guidance).

The two head up to wine country from their supposed hometown of San Diego (Giamatti and Haden Church point out that locations labeled by the film with subtitles aren’t always as in real life). They travel in a red Saab belonging to Miles, and for a starter, they have a crate of pinot noir with them.

(The two male leads, by the way, provide the only during-the-film commentary available on the DVD, and what they mainly do is joke around, such as on how they accidentally look in a shot—they are quite entertaining, but they don’t do a lot to tell how the film was made technically, which is what I like about the usual during-the-film commentary, especially from a director.)

These two aren’t meant to be entirely virtuous, even aside from the sexual affairs that erupt on Jack’s side. Miles steals some money from his mother’s stash in a bureau drawer when they visit her on the way up. The two lie to each other at times (at least, Miles does to Jack), though they are clearly enough dyed-in-the-wool friends, despite their sharp personality differences, that they help each other at crucial junctures (or Miles, more than once, helps the more childish Jack).

Jack sets out his own friend-serving agenda: his best-man gift to Miles—who he says (or who Miles says?) has been “officially depressed for two years”—is to get him laid. (The story arc leads to a point where, as things have come to a sort of fix, Jack proclaims sternly to Miles, “I am going to get laid before I get married, and I don’t want you to [****] it up.”)

Two unattached women enter the mix

Not only is this film good-timey enough that its title gets used as a sort of “automatic association” marketing “reference point” for Payne’s career (it disappoints me that this sometimes slapstick-y film is cited as if it was his best or trademark film); it is accessible enough that when you see on its DVD packaging four youngish faces, two of them female, you kind of get what this film is generally about.

At one restaurant, the two men meet Maya (Virginia Madsen), who is waitressing there—she had been married to a philosophy professor, but it will turn out she got divorced. A little later they encounter, at one of the wine-tasting places they visit, a Stephanie, played by Sandra Oh. Stephanie, it turns out, knows Maya (and Stephanie seems a divorced or never-married mom). The movie reaches a sort of high point when the four are in a double-date situation at a restaurant, and a photo montage starts to flow, tastefully edited, with nice performances, and intercut with wine-ad-like shots of bottles being presented by waiters. The way the two men have encountered a potential mate for each is one charming aspect of the story. (In a tasteful later scene at Stephanie’s house, when Miles is alone talking with Maya, it turns out Maya is doing graduate study in horticulture, so she’s about as cerebral as Miles, while Jack—in a more precipitous way—seems more libidinously matched with the slim Stephanie.)

But Payne’s hearty preferred niche is stories focusing on men in a sort of emotional/spiritual crisis. This is one of them. But there is a tradeoff for this film, in the process of its meeting criteria as a kind of big-audience, whoop-with-fun ride: there are copious scenes of Miles and Jack tasting wine at various sunny locations (Miles is such a loquacious connoisseur of wines, with his analysis of taste and smell, that you almost wonder if he is making his articulate assessments up to some extent; but at a sample that is redolent to Miles of inferiority, Jack, in character, will opine like a philistine, “Tastes good enough to me!”). To include all the wine content and the new-dates-then-bawdy-sexual-episodes content, the component of the melancholic male has to be toned down, or somehow subverted.

A languorous moment of melancholy makes a rich but isolated appearance

Miles fairly often comes across as a prude, or a killjoy, when he is not filling a role—if somewhat shrilly—as a needed conscience for Jack. The fun times and more shallow comedy tend to “blur out” the melancholic content almost like the DP’s filtering or lens-flare shots add a sort of vague delightfulness to the shots while making them not entirely incisive. The one point where a fair amount of Payne-style justice is given to the melancholic-male theme is when Miles, at the double-date restaurant scene, has gotten rather drunk on all the glasses of the various wines he had, and heads on uneven feet but with solid drive to a payphone and talks to his ex-wife about how she has gotten remarried, which is OK…but it means Miles thus won’t be at Jack’s wedding.

The editing of this sequence—including having dial tone and phone ringing sounds happen before Miles has gotten to the phone (as if the sounds mean he’s obsessing about making the call)—with his rather sickish face at the phone, in partial shots, and his stumbling, rather-slurred talk, and muted music: it all is a nice way to show a relatable tipsy/melancholic moment when Miles is trying to get some control over his emotions, not yet settled, regarding his ex-wife. (His ex-wife, sensibly on her part, is uncomfortable about the call and wants to hang up.) It’s at moments like this when, even if we agree Miles can be peevish and self-involved, we still feel for him in his suffering, even if it’s displayed among a double date that seems delightful to the others.

I took a fair amount of notes on this film (I had to take out two DVDs, one from each of two libraries, because one was so badly damaged, making for skips that missed a lot of a couple scenes, that I had to have the other to see the scenes where the skips had been), but I meant this review to be short.

As you might expect, from this pleasantly photo’d movie (with nice, jaunty music by Rolfe Kent, including interspliced samples of hit songs [not by him] for situational spice), with its sharply drawn comedy and economical scenes, Jack’s agenda eventually becomes known to Stephanie—who understandably goes ballistic on him, having found she was only to be his rollicking fling before he got married in a few short days. (The film’s comedy is such that at one point Jack even thinks he is so much in love with Stephanie that he will abandon the upcoming wedding, take up with Steph, move to this area, and have a business partnership with Miles in a vineyard.)

A final fling shows how bad the hi-jinks can get

Jack isn’t through with his 16-year-old’s drive. In a bawdily comic film like this, for there to be a real dramatic arc featuring someone learning something but good, things—as in some Coens films, for example—can go from the “broad-comic sublime” to the “ridiculously downturning yet darkly comic.”

Jack is going to have a date with a waitress at yet another restaurant the two men have dined at. Miles starts to remonstrate with him. Jack, cogently enough for someone of his speed, points out that Miles—who knows all about literature, movies, and wine—doesn’t understand Jack’s “plight.”

Then Jack really does encounter a plight, though not one he expected. Banging on the motel door. Miles, groggy, goes to answer. Jack is there, ludicrously naked, and cold. Gets hastily under a blanket. Jack asks, Where’s the Vicodin? It turned out the waitress’s husband worked the night shift and came home and found his wife with Jack. Jack walked several miles, naked, on a cold night, at one point through an ostrich farm, whose inhabitants weren’t entirely friendly.

One problem: Jack left his wallet at the woman’s house. No problem, says Miles; we can cancel his credit cards, etc. But no, Jack insists: the wedding rings, so hard to pick out, are in the wallet. Jack bawls like a baby when he assures Miles he can’t lose Christine, his fiancee.

They go back to the waitress’s house, at about dawn. After they have some conversational tussle in the car, it is Miles who will sneak into the house and retrieve the wallet for his old friend. Miles cat-burglars into the rather tawdry house, and finds that in a cluttered bedroom, with some country honk sounding to me like Rick Derringer roaring on the stereo, the waitress and her husband are doing the nasty on a bed. The wallet is on a dresser just beyond them (and look, there are George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on TV, just beyond the rather obscene sex act in progress). Miles hustles in like a smash-and-grab thief, races out of the house. The husband, bollock-naked (and with not the pleasantest of bodies) runs out after him. Miles just about gets into his car, slamming the door closed, as the furious husband bumps up against it like a fat-sac, non-CGI vision from hell. The Saab heads off in the growing morning light.

A test of friendship doesn’t get any tougher than this, when it involves a sort of stop in a lower-middle-class Hades.

A restoration of seriousness comes with promise

At the wedding, as Jack is amid taking his vows, he gives Miles a secret appreciative/wiseass look, as if to remember the frat-boy good times they’d just had.

In almost a story coda, Miles ends up getting an interested-in-you phone call from Maya, who had also parted ways angrily with Miles for a time, following the revelation about the purpose of their trip. But before that, he had given her a copy of his novel manuscript, what looks like 2,000 pages in two stationery boxes. She leaves words for him that, we can assess, seem like maybe he has a new mate in his future too.

This film has many nice moments, if you like this kind of accessible, often broad-humor fun. It is Payne’s most animal-instinct story of despair—if, looking on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you wanted characters operating often on the lowest level, on the level of animal appetites, rather than those given more to struggles concerning the higher emotions, more complex concerns of “profane” life, and more religiously-aimed questions.

Payne’s new film Nebraska is being released this month, November. I hope the critics remember that he did more than just Sideways.

End note.

This does not include me. I said "some of us" to be courteous, and as not to say something like "There are shiftless slobs who...." Anyway, I myself was not in a fraternity, and from what I remember of them from college, members were more interested in drinking than in seeking out one night stands or such.