by Daniel Santelli, Staff Writer

Part sci-fi fairy-tale, part psychological hall of mirrors, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence marches toward its twentieth year looking better than ever and ripe for reevaluation. It was greeted with a collective shrug and dismal domestic returns upon release, but time has been especially kind to this perplexing amalgam of sentiment and solemnity, initially dreamed up by Stanley Kubrick, in which Man plays God and Collodi gets Bettelheim’d. A deceptively simple movie in premise and appearance, A.I. is a deeply affecting and powerful tour de force from a filmmaker at the very top of their game, fueled by a metaphysical core worthy of comparison to the speculations of Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. The film brings out the best in Spielberg, not just as a creator of populist spectacle but as a shrewd mystic with an underpraised knack for philosophical provocation. It may very well be my favorite of his movies.

Set in a near-future wracked by climate change and government-imposed mandates limiting pregnancies, A.I.’s dilemma unfolds as Professor Hobby (William Hurt) proposes the manufacturing of a Mecha designed to love and learn to self-regulate, in an effort to refute technology’s void of emotion. His creation is David, a little robot-boy played by Haley Joel Osment, in an extraordinary performance that is convincing in part for how it straddles the line between familiarly human and distinctly alien. David’s journey is a spiritually poignant coming-of-age: he experiences the security of a mother’s imprinted love, the tribulations of abandonment, and the hardships of questing through a world that treats beings like him as others. As a result, A.I. slowly evolves into an existential meditation on what it means to be human as refracted through the lens of nonhuman entities. Spielberg handles the material with an acute sleight of hand, alternating between wide-eyed awe and piercing despair, as David embarks on a search for the Blue Fairy of Pinocchio in hopes of becoming a real boy and returning home – and to the womb.

A.I. laces its psychoanalyzing of Carlo Collodi’s classic with a rogues’ gallery of emblems and environs denoting motherhood. The film’s opening image is that of a sea’s crashing waves, presenting the main symbolic thrust and foreshadowing David’s perilous dive into the abyss where he’ll remain for 2,000 years. A quiet early scene shows David enraptured by the story of Pinocchio, analogizing his robotic state with that of the wooden puppet and cleverly setting up the back-half that sees the fairy-tale play out within the movie’s world. A carnivalesque Flesh Fair showcases reaffirming empty spectacle for the prejudiced masses; a red-light metropolis subs in for the city of Catchfools; and the belly of a whale becomes the womb of the ocean. Because A.I. flirts with mythmaking, the approach to psychology is less rooted in the specifics of character than of archetype. If Jung were still around, he’d have a field day with this.

Based on an Ian Watson treatment written for Kubrick, itself an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” Spielberg’s A.I. feels less like a translation of Kubrick’s cinematic ethos than an inversion of it. In the most general sense, Kubrick films involve human characters succumbing to dehumanization while a camera views their plight from a distance. In A.I., Spielberg flips that formula: he observes David, whose familiar appearance and robotic status make him an uncanny other, through a style that retains the Spielbergian sentiment but sees that tenderness occasionally undermined by the philosophical inquiry. (Even the fairy-tale future of A.I. is a clash between the cosmetically magical and functionally hostile.) This ultimately conjures a dissonance between the maker’s heart and the maker’s brain.

But this dissonance isn’t uncommon in Spielberg’s work. In fact, several of his features seem torn between sharing an undying empathy with basic humanity and expressing dissatisfaction/resentment toward how humanity enacts itself. A.I. puts David front and center, but Spielberg also places human responsibility under the microscope and, in the back half, scrutinizes it through the eyes of Mecha. Around the hour mark, a noticeable change in tone and perspective occurs, as David transitions away from the human sphere and witnesses the callousness directed at Mecha first-hand, allowing Spielberg to explore the fundamentals of existence by characterizing them through the experience of non-human lifeforms. (As connotative beings, the robots are curiously free-floating representatives, with readings that may range from second-class citizens, proletariat workforce, autistics, and, most broadly, humankind itself.) In A.I., Spielberg probes some of the more fundamental questions of human existence: can we truly transcend the motions we go through in life and the prejudices we carry?; are those conditioned to think they’re an exception destined for disappointment?; is it possible to live in the gray and satisfy the need to love (and be loved) in a disharmonious world mired in information, technology, intolerance, and uncertainty of where we’re heading?

David may never blink throughout the course of A.I., but that doesn’t preclude him from failing to see through his own distortions. He’s been built to love, and be loved by, the person who implanted their image as “mother” onto his mainframe, and, as such, this results in David spending the last ninety minutes carrying out his programming to a delusional degree; subconsciously, he seemingly longs to transcend his own facileness while, ironically, doing exactly what he’s been designed to do. There are other instances of this deficiency: before abandoning him, Monica (Frances O’Connor) apologizes for “not telling [David] about the world”, acknowledging a parental failing; Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) mistakes signs of physical violence on a woman’s body for “wounds of passion”; David lunges at a blue fairy hologram believing it to be more than a simulacrum. In a sense, A.I. could be read as a story of blindness – of misreading emotion, failing to reason rationally, or simply convincing yourself of a reality that doesn’t exist.

Ever an empath, Spielberg has, over the course of his career, proven to be one of the medium’s most instinctive and accomplished filmmakers, a master at playing on our emotions and revealing the inner lives of characters through technique. For him, dollying in on a face bears the gravity of approaching the window to a soul. He’s uncannily adept at making the audience care about the hypothetical feelings of characters who, themselves, don’t feel anything, merely perform their function. But here, even that emotional heart, as genuine as it seems, rubs against the ruminative and threatening quandaries that find their way into the narrative. And yet, rather than disrupt the sensation of warmth, the friction complicates it and the tricky dance between form and content achieves a peculiar ambivalence. This feels less like an unresolved tension and more like Spielberg deepening his ability to move and manipulate the viewer, as he progresses through some of the most profound terrain he’s ever trekked through as a storyteller.

A.I. concludes with a haunting foray into the distant future, where the Earth has frozen over and an advanced breed of Mecha excavate ancient ruins to gain insight into past life. Finding himself enclosed within a virtual reality, David encounters the Blue Fairy and, lastly, experiences the fantasy of an idyllic day with a simulacrum of Monica. The critics of this finale charge Spielberg with failing to honor the build-up’s Kubrickian chill by supplying a sentimental fantasy for David and leaving the audience on a note of tenderness and heartbreak. It’s heartbreaking for sure, but how can we divorce the (perceived) warmth of David’s wish-fulfillment from the context of the entire sequence? The final act posits the Earth as a post-human landscape and concerns the extinction of humanity and, thus, human thought and feeling, now abstract concepts to be deciphered (and maybe never fully grasped) by the Earth-inheriting Mecha. This is a dark, somber coda that envisions the definitive upshot of human irresponsibility. And yet, Spielberg doesn’t play it as ironic and finally rejects the glib miserablist tone to which a lesser filmmaker might’ve succumbed. He allows the sequence to play out like a genuine desolation; the audience feels impacted rather than prodded.

Viewers may find themselves comparing the concluding scenes of A.I. to those of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as David’s day with Monica plays like a thematic continuation of Kubrick’s mysterious ending. Conceptually, the David/Monica fantasy reminds me of no less than the Third Impact sequence of Hideaki Anno’s The End of Evangelion, seeing as both fuse metacinematics with womb fantasies in service of fulfilling the protagonist’s desire and toying with the audience’s emotions. But while Anno forcefully urges the audience to crawl out of the womb, Spielberg frames the scenario in both darkness and light. Audiences may luxuriate in the outward sentimentality and leave with a few happy tears in their eyes, but, in one fell swoop, Spielberg lets the Ben Kingsley voiceover underscore the fleeting nature of what David yearned for and the true loss that occurs once Monica closes her eyes for the last time — “that was the everlasting moment he had been waiting for, and the moment had passed.” It’s the ultimate climax, in a film that works on levels of emotion, metaphysics, poetics, and philosophy in equal measure. Such unities are rare, and rarely so devastating.