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
20th-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.
