Given that David never becomes the little love Spielberg intends him to be, it's very hard to have any emotional reaction to watching the child-robot in peril during the assaultive showmanship of the Flesh Fair sequence. Set to pounding heavy-metal music, the Flesh Fair is a spectacle (presided over by Brendan Gleeson) that's part WWF match, part demolition derby. In the name of championing the organic over the mechanical, cheering humans assemble to watch captured robots tortured and destroyed in all sorts of flamboyant ways. The sequence makes its point -- by knocking you over the head. Spielberg does capture one moving, magical moment earlier when fugitive robots gather in the woods behind the factory that manufactures them, poring over the discarded machinery to provide themselves with new parts. For a moment, it feels as if Spielberg is right on top of his game.

It's the robots who have the personality in "A.I.," like Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, whose duty is to be the perfect lover to the women who avail themselves of his services. Law, his face made up to waxy, pretty-boy perfection, tries to bring some joie de vivre into the film with his slick patter and knife-sharp movements. (He even pays homage to Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain.") In his first scene he tries to persuade a shy, hesitant woman to allow him to be her lover and when we see the signs of abuse on her body ("Are these the marks of love?" Joe asks in robot innocence) the idea of robots' being better than humans seems, as Kubrick would have made it seem, not so awful.

The section of David and Joe making their way through Rouge City, the futuristic red-light district, is certainly seedier than anything Spielberg has put on film before. But the real drama is the one taking place in the director's head. Essentially Spielberg is trying to meld Kubrick's misanthropic vision of a technologically dominated future with his own vision about the transformative power of emotion. He's trying to be true to his idol and be true to himself, but he can't do one without going against the grain of the other. So the film winds up feeling less an emotionally and intellectually unified vision than a series of -- sometimes spectacular -- sequences.

As much as his instincts are at war with Kubrick's, Spielberg is also at war with his own instincts. Something in Spielberg balks when he tries to address the darker aspects of childhood. "A.I." is as audacious and technologically breathtaking as was Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun," and emotionally it's just as muddled, just as heavy-spirited, just as off-putting. Had Spielberg ended "A.I." 20 minutes earlier, during an eerie, becalmed undersea sequence, as conflicted as the film is he might have given it the narratively satisfying shape of a tragic fairy tale. But there's a coda, set an additional 2,000 years in the future, in which Spielberg's worst heartwarming instincts take over. The coda might have worked if it acknowledged the echoes of the themes in the first part of the film. (Without giving anything away, I can say that the sequence features ample proof of David's obliviousness to anything but his own emotional needs.) But you can scarcely hear those echoes amidst the weeping Spielberg elicits for his little robot boy lost.

For everything wrong with it, "A.I." is not a dismissible film. It's too richly imagined, too accomplished. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them, wrestles with the picture's conflicting impulses. It's the kind of screwup you get only from a master filmmaker. I can imagine audiences becoming puzzled and maybe even hostile to its tone shifts, its unresolved mixture of bathos and coldness, the way it keeps going on after it appears to be finished. It may be that Kubrick acolytes will point to the film's sentimental passages as proof that Spielberg was unworthy of taking over from Kubrick, or that, as some early reviews have already shown, critics who were never particularly fond of Spielberg will hail a new dimension in his work. Or it may be that "A.I." becomes one of those failed Hollywood films whose faults are overlooked by champions who claim that audiences weren't prepared for the chances it took.

Whatever the fate of "A.I." the question it leaves open is where Steven Spielberg goes from here. It's understandable that, having mastered fantasy filmmaking (and been branded a juvenile filmmaker because of it), he would want to make himself over as a mature director. But Spielberg is caught between the genuine wish to evolve and the impulse to cancel out the warmth and desire to please that made him a wonderful filmmaker in the first place -- even though he returns to those gifts when he is unsure of his material, whether they are suited to the projects he is making or not. "A.I.," the story of a robot child who wants to be human, is also the story of a filmmaker who wants to be accepted as a real live adult. It's Spielberg's search for his own Blue Fairy. Be careful what you wish for. Spielberg is a far greater filmmaker than he realizes when he's a real live boy.

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