Artificial maturity

In "A.I.," Steven Spielberg continues his quest to be a real live adult. He was far greater as a real live boy.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 29, 2001 | There's a small, little-remarked-on scene in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" that could stand as a symbol for Steven Spielberg's career. Just after E.T. has seemingly died, we see little Elliot's teenage brother (Robert MacNaughton) hiding in his bedroom closet, weeping. This is the boy's first encounter with the adult feelings of grief; his instinct is to retreat to a place where he's surrounded by the toys and clothes that are the comforting artifacts of childhood.

That's the metaphorical closet that Steven Spielberg has been trying to emerge from for the last 16 years, first with "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun," and then with "Schindler's List," "Amistad" and "Saving Private Ryan." Spielberg has been determined to prove himself a grown-up who has left childish things behind.

Watching an entertaining but essentially soulless enterprise like "Jurassic Park," which showed none of the wit, inventiveness or cunning that was so astonishing in "Jaws," it seemed like a good thing for Spielberg to move beyond the type of ready-made wonderment that he could apparently toss off at will. But with the exception of "Schindler's List," the first 45 minutes of "Empire of the Sun" and the opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan," his "adult" work has been stiff and unconvincing. They were as much products of Hollywood as his fantasy films, serious in the manner of top-heavy prestige productions of the '50s and '60s, worthy and faintly anonymous. And watching the failed seriousness of "Amistad" or most of "Saving Private Ryan," you began to wonder if we'd ever again see the director who, at his best, is one of the greatest and most emotionally direct and generous popular entertainers the movies have ever produced.

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"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" is Spielberg's attempt to unite those two strains, the showman and the adult filmmaker. It's a wildly problematic movie: ambitious on a scale that few filmmakers can even contemplate, daring in its attempt to make a break with its director's past work even as it extends the themes of that work, gutsy in its willingness to alienate audiences. It is also a mess of jarring impulses and tones that leaves viewers stranded, with no access to the film that makes emotional sense. Spielberg clearly wants to bring a new element of darkness and pessimism to his work but he's also wary of losing his audience -- and perhaps not even philosophically comfortable with pessimism in the first place.

"A.I." contains scenes darker than any he has put on screen, but in the end Spielberg reverts to what has worked for him before and the film winds up pulling our heartstrings in a manner that requires us to ignore what has come before. Spielberg desperately wants a heart-rending finale, even at the expense of coherence. The result is some sort of anti-achievement: a cold fairy tale, a procession of wonders from which we have been deliberately, even ruthlessly, distanced.

Part of that distance comes from Spielberg's wish to stay true to the director who initiated the project. By now, there's no one who doesn't know that "A.I." began in the late '80s as a Stanley Kubrick project. Kubrick, who died two years ago, had been intrigued by the prospect of turning Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" into a film. But one of the obstacles, even apart from the years Kubrick typically took on every project, was that the technology simply did not exist for the movie that Kubrick envisioned. Eventually he moved on to other projects. But then, reportedly intrigued by the CGI advances of Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" in 1993, he allowed Warner Bros. to announce that "A.I." would be his next movie. Two years later, however, the studio said that Kubrick would direct "A.I." after he completed "Eyes Wide Shut," the film that proved to be his last.

During this time Kubrick had begun a friendship with Spielberg, with whom he consulted about the project over the years, at one point even proposing that he produce and Spielberg direct his script. After Kubrick's death, the project passed to Spielberg, who, working from a screen story by Ian Watson, wrote a new screenplay, his first since 1982's "Poltergeist." ("A.I." is ultimately credited as an Amblin/Stanley Kubrick Production.)

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