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spielberg in the 80s

• raiders of the lost ark
• e.t.
• indiana jones and the temple of doom
• indiana jones and the last crusade

spielberg in the 90s

• jurassic park
• schindler's list
• the lost world: jurassic park
• saving private ryan

spielberg in the 00s

• a.i.: artificial intelligence
• minority report
• catch me if you can
• the terminal
• war of the worlds
• munich
• indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull

spielberg in the 10s

• the adventures of tintin: the secret of the unicorn
• war horse

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I would be satisfied if A.I. were a great movie. I would be satisfied if A.I. were an awful movie. But A.I. is neither, and both, of these things.... it's the most perplexing, frustrating, mesmerizing and disappointing film I've seen in a long time.

The long-talked-about collision of style, between Spielberg and Kubrick, isn't really an issue. Kubrick was entranced by E.T., and gave A.I. its acronymical title in deference. The sentimentality of the storyline - a robot boy's search for Pinocchio's Blue Angel, who will make him real - is also a Kubrick legacy, as was the wisdom, on Kubrick's part, of realizing that the story was better suited to Spielberg's talents than to his. Thus, any stylistic conflict exist only in the eternally-conflicted Spielberg.

In his highest moments, Steven Spielberg is hands down the best filmmaker alive today. He is an unparalleled craftsman with a fundamental understanding, that borders on the freakishly innate, of how to translate narrative into pure cinema.

When he has a single, blunted purpose in a film, the results are breathtaking. His best works - Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark for me - give him a single narrative thread to pull along, and with a laserlike focus, he is relentless in presenting that story as cinematic magic.

The cinema of Spielberg, however, has always been marred by the serious problem of Spielberg getting away from himself. 1941 (dare we speak the name of the black marble?), Amistad, The Colour Purple.... too many things happening at once, Spielberg trying to be too many different types of directors, answer too many different types of questions. The films end up as mush, carrying all the stylistic weight of their brothers and sisters, but none of the emotional interest.

A.I. is the same kind of sprawling, lumbering hodgepodge. Under a more focused eye (and a script at least 45 pages shorter), the film could have been an excellent bauble, visionary and stylish. As it is, with the weight of so much story, and under the weight of so much responsibility to the Late Great Stanley, A.I. changes hats more often than Gigolo Joe changes hair, and the result is a film that is only flawless in one respect: it never fails to frustrate.

There are parts of the film - large parts of the film, don't get me wrong - that are works of dedicated genius. In fact, taken on the whole, A.I. would have been a much better movie if it had just ended when David jumps off the building. Everything that had been messy or cloying up until that point - the god-light mother sequences, William Hurt's scientist character - could have been very easily forgiven and forgotten.

I'm talking about what essentially amounts to the first two acts of the film, which, isolated, work increasingly well with every passing minute. The first twenty minutes leave us believing we are trapped in some Spielberg suburban nightmare world, all soft light and cutesy vignettes, and god love the walking teddy bear - but just as we are becoming fed up with this, Spielberg (to his credit) begins tearing down all that classical Spielbergianism, showing a twisted darkness beneath everything that grows and grows until we are gleefully watching a very sick tale.

The first portion of Spielberg's career (The Sugarland Express to Empire of the Sun) dealt primarily with the Glorification of the Mother. Then, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Saving Private Ryan, he switched gears into Atonement with the Father. Now, it seems, he is moving into the third part of the triptych - What Happens to the Kids. The kid in A.I. is the product of selfishness and self-involvement, and his human creators and parents never serve his needs, just their own. He is cast out into the world in a riveting sequence which ends with his "mommy" saying "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world," and her failure in that regard is what propels David down a path of self-delusion and destruction. Parental self-involvement has created offspring equipped with no sense of self, no ability to cope, just a lifelong obsession with returning to the womb.

All this plays out brilliantly, through phantasmagoric sequences at the Flesh Fair and in Rouge City, through Jude Law's delightful (if painfully un-perverse) performance as the Walking Vibrator, right up to the moment that David smashes the goopy yellow brains of his fellow A.I. and jumps off a skyscraper.

Unfortunately, the film shreds itself from this point on. Spielberg tacks on a truly livid coda - it turns out that the aliens from Close Encounters speak with British accents, whowuddathunkit - requiring that David's faith, religious or otherwise, be ultimately rewarded in some form, and that he find the way to the fulfillment of his wishes. And it just doesn't work. Everything that worked up until this point is torpedoed, and the film falls apart.

It will be interesting to see where A.I. eventually ends up - a strange footnote to Stanley Kubrick's career, or a stranger paragraph in Spielberg's. Ultimately, it leaves me with only one feeling, the same feeling I've had for eight years now - when is Spielberg going to get back to making movies?