Steven Spielberg (96 page)

The much-derided but brilliant ending sequence of
A.I.
shows the robot boy, David (marvelously played by Haley Joel Osment), fantasizing one last day with his “mother,” Monica (Frances O’Connor), and finding the love he has always sought from her. This coda, like that of
2001
, has a similarly complex tone of combined wish-fulfillment and obliteration, similarly coexisting in a fantasy dimension. The sequence in
A.I.
appears as an epilogue to the
extinction
of humanity, with New York City shown submerged by flooding caused by global warming. Audiences reacted with patent outrage to the film’s
conclusion
, partly, no doubt, because of its bleak view of humanity’s future; the epilogue was widely attacked as both sentimental and unnecessary, and yet it is the heart of what the movie is saying. Hostile viewers either fundamentally misunderstood the even darker irony of the epilogue or perhaps recoiled from what they sensed: As Kubrick wrote in his notes for the film, “David wants to become a real boy, which is impossible, but he manages to turn Monica into an android.”

Spielberg understood the covert humanistic impulses in Kubrick’s work and personality: “This shows a side of Stanley that people haven’t seen
before
, which was a very deeply emotional and lonely side.” But Spielberg also brought his own warmer emotional sensibility to this strangely moving finale.
Anyone regarding it as a sentimental happy ending would have to explain how that could be when the event is clearly happening only in the
imagination
, and when the price of seeing the mother again, for such brief moments of happiness, is the death of both mother and son. The mother’s expressions of love are clearly projections of the resurrected robot boy’s desires, as activated on his behalf by SuperMecha robots (the sequence has a strong Oedipal
component
), and the sequence takes to its ultimate conclusion the film’s central paradox of showing the mechanical child as the true repository of human feeling, in contrast to the coldness of his parents and the other humans he encounters. That the robot child with artificial intelligence is the last
surviving
representative of (or, perhaps more precisely, emissary from) humanity is a moving and chilling irony.

“The whole last twenty minutes of the movie was completely Stanley’s,” said Spielberg. “The whole first thirty-five, forty minutes of the film—all the stuff in the house—was word for word from Stanley’s screenplay [since
Kubrick
did not write a screenplay for
A.I.
, Spielberg evidently was referring to Watson’s treatment]. This was Stanley’s vision.”

But as unusually faithful as Spielberg tried to be to another man’s vision,
A.I.
nevertheless embodies many of Spielberg’s deepest personal concerns and obsessions. Spielberg took the unusual step of writing the screenplay himself from Watson’s screen story (the last time Spielberg took sole screenplay credit on one of his films was on
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, although that script also was not a one-man job). Spielberg’s somewhat exaggerated
protestations
of fidelity to Kubrick show his frustration over people’s unwillingness to credit him with a comparably dark and mature sensibility. His comment that “in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of
A.I.
, not me” is another way of staking the same artistic claim, although that is an odd way for Spielberg to refer to the beginning and ending of the film, in which any “sweetness” is highly qualified. Tapping into Kubrick’s vision and following the late filmmaker’s visual and dramatic plan for much of the film was not the self-effacing act it seemed but a channeling operation that enabled
Spielberg
to access and express his own deep-seated feelings of sorrow and anger over the limitations of the human race.
A.I.
is, among other things, one of the most anguished looks at parental neglect ever put onscreen. Spielberg’s familiar obsession with irresponsible father and mother figures results in the harrowing scene of Monica abandoning her child in the woods like a dog she no longer wants. This scene is so overwhelmingly painful, evoking such
fairy-tale
horror as the death of the mother doe in the snowy meadow in Disney’s
Bambi
, that Spielberg’s audiences recoiled in shock and anger.

With the irresponsible-father theme in Spielberg’s work somewhat in eclipse following his reconciliation with his own father and the making of
Saving Private Ryan, A.I.
returns most forcefully to his previous concentration on the irresponsible mother, a figure seen memorably in Spielberg’s very dark early work
The Sugarland Express
and revisited in some other films,
including
Close Encounters
and
Empire of the Sun
. But it’s important to note that the
father in
A.I.
(Sam Robards) is even more unfeeling; it is his wish to have their troublesome robot boy scrapped that leads the mother to her desperate attempt to preserve his life, at the cost of leaving him to fend for himself in a hostile world. Perhaps it was Spielberg’s newfound understanding from his parents that both were responsible for their divorce that made it possible for him to spread the blame in
A.I.

Spielberg claimed, “I’m the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That’s why [Kubrick] wanted me to make the movie in the first place.” Nevertheless, Chris Baker, who worked on the film with Spielberg after helping Kubrick envision
A.I.
, reported, “The design of the Fair didn’t change much at all from the initial ideas with Stanley to the final film” (Baker’s drawings bear out the accuracy of that statement). That Spielberg exaggerated his role in realizing the Flesh Fair is another revealing glimpse into his self-image and defensiveness toward his critics. But
Spielberg’s
sensibilities are also much on view in the Flesh Fair, a metaphor for a
futuristic
Holocaust in which “orgas” (humans) entertain themselves by violently decimating unwanted “mechas” (robots). This appalling display of human
venality
expands the concept of the demolition derby into genocidal dimensions. Kubrick, who was also Jewish, had the Holocaust in mind while conceiving
A.I.
and had been planning his own Holocaust film,
Aryan Papers
, which he abandoned after seeing how well Spielberg dealt with the subject in
Schindler’s List
(and also, reportedly, because the subject so depressed him). But in the Flesh Fair we see how vividly Spielberg utilizes his gifts for depicting cruelty. After bearing cinematic witness to the horrors of war and the Holocaust, he takes a similar approach to the emotional and physical horrors experienced by robots at the hands of humanity within the sci-fi context of
A.I.

One element that would have been considerably different if Kubrick had directed the film is the character of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the “love mecha” who becomes David’s protector. Spielberg transformed the harsher, sexier Gigolo Joe character of Kubrick’s and Watson’s conception into a kindly
father
figure and protector. That change influenced the Rouge City sequences, which Kubrick and Baker conceived of as blatantly lewd in their visual
imagery
. That part of the film was toned down due to censorship considerations, and also, no doubt, because of Spielberg’s characteristically tentative approach to eroticism, making Rouge City seem more like a somewhat risqué Oz than a futuristic Sodom and Gomorrah. The role of the boy’s conscience,
A.I.
’s equivalent of Jiminy Cricket from
Pinocchio
, is assumed by his ambulatory stuffed bear, Teddy (“The teddy bear was Stanley’s,” Spielberg said). Kubrick admittedly never managed to work out the tone of this middle section of the film showing Gigolo Joe and Teddy accompanying David in his search for the Blue Fairy. Spielberg’s warmer approach to Gigolo Joe gives the audience some hopeful relief from the surrounding bleakness and offers further vestiges of humanity in the form of another robot, this one created for the purpose of prostitution but with the proverbial heart of gold. Jude Law’s graceful
performance
, evoking Fred Astaire, enables him to transcend any stereotypical
pitfalls to create a sophisticated commentary on the degradation he tries to surmount.

If it is sentimental to envision robots as having superior feelings to humans, that is part of the challenge Kubrick and Spielberg offer the audience with
A.I.
The film asks us to consider, “What is humanity? Why do we consider ourselves superior to other creatures? What should be our attitude toward artificial intelligence? Is it a boon or a curse?” The name of the creator of the robot boy, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), is Spielberg’s in-joke tribute to Kubrick himself, who called his production company Hobby Films (Kubrick had planned to call the character Professor Nicholls). Professor Hobby is a reckless Dr. Frankenstein figure, but the creature he builds as a replica of his own dead son becomes the last vestige of human feelings. Exercising to the fullest extent his unprecedented clout as a filmmaker, earned through decades of entertaining and enlightening audiences, Spielberg was asking a lot of his summer 2001 audience in expecting it to contemplate the extermination of its own species and accusing it of heartless mistreatment of its own creations. His career-long concerns about adult cruelty toward children and family
dysfunction
are broadened in
A.I.
to encompass the entire world, and the picture he offers is not a pretty one, though not entirely despairing. In Richard Schickel’s 2007 documentary
Spielberg on Spielberg
, the director says that his purpose was “questioning the audience that came to see
A.I.
about what is the difference between sentient behavior and the behavior of a doll. And where is your moral judgment going to fall? How are you gonna judge creatures who look and act and behave just like us? And I think a lot of people were offended that that question was put to them.”

A.I.
received generally respectful, if not especially appreciative or fully comprehending, reviews, but its box-office returns dropped precipitously in its second weekend, a sign of disastrous word of mouth. Though the film grossed $235.9 million worldwide (only $78.6 million of that in the United States), on a production cost of about $100 million, it was widely perceived as a failure. The largely abstract publicity campaign and the film’s title, with their echoes of
E.T.
, may have been partly responsible for misleading
audiences
into thinking
A.I.
would be another heartwarming Spielberg movie with a child protagonist. When
A.I.
opened in Japan, a retooled ad campaign showing more scenes from the actual film and pictures of the characters in the print ads rather than simply a drawing of the robot child helped it do
considerably
better business and gave it more appeal to young audiences. But
A.I.
belongs in the category of films that shake up audience expectations and as such are not destined to be immediate crowd-pleasers. It is not only a Steven Spielberg film but also a Stanley Kubrick film, and most of Kubrick’s films were coldly received at the time of their release and only gradually became regarded as classics once the public had grown into understanding and accepting their groundbreaking dimensions. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet with
A.I.
, but the film should remain one of Spielberg’s most towering and enduring achievements.

The gathering darkness evident in Spielberg’s body of work since
Schindler’s List
, a mood that persisted in
Saving Private Ryan
and gained force with
A.I.
, took on a new urgency over the next few years as the director dealt with the chilling new atmosphere in the United States following the attacks on New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Those attacks occurred only two and a half months after the opening of
A.I.
, whose depiction of the ruined New York skyline shows the damaged Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out of the ocean. Despite public and industry pressure on filmmakers to obliterate images of the Twin Towers from their films after 9/11, an odd response in denial paralleling the attacks themselves, Spielberg admirably refused to participate in that pseudo-patriotic charade and kept the Twin Towers in
A.I.
for its home video release. He also would show the Towers in the ending sequence of his 2005 film
Munich
, the most explicit symbol of his concentration on the effects the catastrophe has had on world politics and the American way of life.

I
BARELY
recognize this country anymore,” a character laments in one of the films Spielberg made in the aftermath of 9/11. And that is from one of his
lighter
films,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
. Even in his “entertainments,” Spielberg
addressed
the national trauma and the repressive political climate of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney era with a pointed and probing intensity. The attacks on the United States and the ensuing assaults on American civil liberties were reflected metaphorically (and sometimes more overtly) in film after film as Spielberg questioned what had become of his country in the new century and challenged it to remember and live up to its former ideals. The role of political artist that Spielberg assumed with
Schindler’s List
, and the extraordinary public responsibilities that went with it, helped lead him into this position, and rather than run away from it when national trouble came, he reacted with fervor and dedication.

Spielberg’s examination of the policy of preventive detention in
Minority Report
, his horrific depiction of an invasion of the “homeland” in
War of the Worlds
, and his questioning of the morality of targeted assassinations of
terrorists
in
Munich
are the most overt examples of how the darkness that
descended
after 9/11 colored his work as a director. But his good-natured Tom Hanks comedy
The Terminal
is just as vigorous a confrontation with these
issues, using Kafkaesque black humor to critically examine the premise that “America is closed” to newcomers. Other Spielberg films from the Bush era find only guarded hope at the end, but
The Terminal
allows him to
triumphantly
reassert the inclusive, welcoming principles he grew up with,
celebrating
what John F. Kennedy called “a nation of immigrants.”

No filmmaker resting on his laurels or coasting in midlife could have shown the ambition and courage to take on the challenges Spielberg
shouldered
with his post-9/11 body of work, which actually began, somewhat
presciently
, when he went into preproduction in 1998 with his chilling futuristic film
Minority Report
(filmed in 2001, before the attacks, and released in 2002). Spielberg risked his popularity repeatedly to make a series of films boldly addressing his fellow citizens, and his audience throughout the world, about the radically changed political and social circumstances in which they found themselves. He recognized how difficult that journey was for some of his audience: “You wouldn’t believe how many people come up to me in the street and repeat almost verbatim the lines the Martians say to Woody Allen in
Stardust Memories:
‘You know, we like your earlier, funnier films.’” That Spielberg still managed to draw wide audiences, despite some spectator resistance, for his challenging explorations of such troubling themes is another tribute to his range and depth as a popular artist. He occasionally vacillated in his political positions during this period but still produced a rich body of work whose power and significance should stand as a powerful commentary on the cultural turmoil of its time.

And he did so in a period of general escapist frivolity in the American film industry, a time when audiences tended to avoid adult subject matter (including most of the infrequent movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and studios relentlessly pandered to juvenile tastes, as Spielberg’s own DreamWorks did with much of its production slate. The uneasy relationship between Spielberg-as-mogul and Spielberg-as-artist became increasingly schizoid in the 2000s, buttressing the argument that the aging filmmaker consciously used his often crassly commercial business enterprises to enable his personal ventures into increasingly risky artistic terrain. If DreamWorks movies such as
Meet the Fockers, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
, and
The Cat in the Hat
seemed to exist in an alternate universe from
Minority Report
and
Munich
, that was a price Spielberg was willing to pay for the high level of artistic freedom he managed to maintain during this period,
sometimes
against considerable odds.

“I look at the world in which my children are growing up, and when I see darkness I can’t make funny films about it,” he reflected after making his 2005 film
Munich
. “As I get older I feel the burden of responsibility that comes along with such a powerful tool as filmmaking. Now I want to tell stories that really mean something. On the other hand, providing good
entertainment
for a large audience is also very nice. I have often and willingly made movies by popular demand. There is a distinction between
moviemaking
and filmmaking—but both are attractive, and I want to do both.”

T
HEN
he began preparing his film version of the 1956 Philip K. Dick short story “The Minority Report,” Spielberg knew that one of his principal tasks would be to create a believable future world. So in 1999, over three days in Venice, California, he assembled a think tank of experts from various fields to help him brainstorm for the film, which is set in 2054 in Washington, D.C., rather than in the New York City location of the story, a change that heightens its political dimensions.
Time
reviewer Richard Corliss described the film’s visual style as a “mix of future and retro,” a blend of elements from the contemporary world (such as Washington’s monuments and recognizable commercial brands) with speculative elements (multi-touch screen interfaces; automated, high-speed, elevated roadways; jetpacks for flying; miniature police surveillance drones; interactive newspapers; personalized electronic
advertisements
), some of which would actually come to pass not long after the film’s release. Taking the approach of heightened contemporaneity serves to make the film’s themes less remote.

Other than in the scenes dealing with the criminal demimonde on the fringes of the capital,
Minority Report
does not create its dystopia with as grungy a look as Ridley Scott brought to his celebrated 1982 futuristic film noir
Blade Runner
(based on a Dick novel). The visual style of
Minority Report
instead relies on an expressionistic, chilly portrait of a totalitarian future, with Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography and Alex McDowell’s production design relying heavily on blue and other monochromatic tones to create the atmosphere of a bloodless, inhumanly theoretical approach to the problem of crime and punishment. Unlike Spielberg’s hopeful view of futurism in
Close
Encounters
, his more mature vision mostly lacks warmth or consolation, though the denouement of
Minority Report
is less despairing than Dick’s even bleaker view (the film’s sentimental coda seems a jarringly out-of-context afterthought and was described by
Slate
reviewer David Edelstein as “Dick-less … a mushy declaration of humanism”).

The screen adaptation by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen revolves around the issue of “precrime,” the society’s ability to predict when its citizens will commit murders (through the use of precognition by mutant “Precogs”), and its resulting policy of arresting people before they can break the law. Tom Cruise plays a police chief, John Anderton, who heads a precrime unit but finds himself a target of suspicion, forcing him to go on the run to try to clear himself. Spielberg made Anderton younger and more active than the character in the story and characteristically added a family trauma to help motivate Anderton’s fanaticism about law enforcement and provoke his subsequent moral crisis (Anderton’s son was kidnapped and is presumed dead, an event that shattered his marriage). A further level of emotional identification between Spielberg and Anderton is suggested in the way the police chief manipulates his screen interface to create pictures of crimes-in-progress, waving his arms like a director conjuring up sequences of visual imagery. Cruise’s performance, though limited in its emotional range, is grippingly intense, drawing the viewer into his tormented psychological state while still allowing critical
perspective on his actions. Spielberg and his writers give Anderton a foil in his mentor Burgess (Max Von Sydow), the august but deranged creator of the Precrime operation, a flawed Spielbergian father figure who also seems its equivalent of Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft. Von Sydow brings his own Bergmanesque gravity to the film.

Portraying the Precrime policy as experimental and controversial, the film simplifies some of Dick’s labyrinthine and ironic plot twists to focus its investigation more tightly on the nature of free will and the discarding of civil liberties for the sake of expediency. That Spielberg began planning a major cinematic exploration of such issues even before the Bush regime took power in 2000 and instituted the USA Patriot Act in 2001, with its sweeping restrictions on traditional American constitutional rights, showed that the liberal filmmaker was keenly attentive to the underlying philosophical questions and had his ear to the ground in a time of already-increasing encroachments into civil liberties. The filmmaker who had suffered invasions of his own personal privacy from stalker Jonathan Norman and others said he was drawn to the short story because “the whole notion that technology is getting closer and closer to probing the sanctity of our homes and lives and minds concerns me. I thought there was a way to take those themes and collapse them into an old-fashioned murder-mystery.” The deeply moving climax of
Minority Report
shows Anderton coming face-to-face with the man he believes has killed his son and refusing to kill him, instead reading the man his Miranda Rights. That simple gesture of homage to the rule of law, in the context of the world of 2002 in which the film appeared, served as a powerful rebuke toward the police-state policies of Bush and Ashcroft and their assaults on the Constitution. Along with the subsequent revelation in the film that the man Cruise is tempted to kill was not guilty of the crime, the scene challenges the Bush administration’s decision to hold foreign prisoners without charges at Guantánamo and elsewhere on the grounds that even if cases could not be proven against them, they allegedly were dangerous and might commit crimes in the future.

The unexpectedly high degree of relevance the film assumed between the time of its shooting (from March to July 2001) and its release nine months after 9/11 evidently caused Spielberg some alarm. The changed political climate put him in the position of mounting a braver critique of the current administration than he had anticipated while shooting it. As if to forestall possible backlash against the film’s advocacy of civil liberties in the anxious post-9/11 climate, Spielberg offered a dismaying statement to the
New York Times
shortly before the film opened in June 2002: “Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They’re willing to give the FBI and the CIA far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president’s side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again. But the question is, Where do you draw the line? How much freedom are you willing
to give up? That is what this movie is about.” Spielberg’s panicky backtracking calls to mind the words attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Interviewed at the premiere of
Minority Report
, Spielberg said, “We’re giving up some of our freedom so that the government can protect us.” Anyone tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt for that somewhat ambiguous statement would be disappointed by other comments he made in amplification: “Thematically, it was a compelling message—and, of course, this was all before 9/11,” he said in January 2003. “All of a sudden, when Ashcroft was suspending our personal freedoms in order to better protect us as a nation of scared Americans, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and other groups began to worry that these privacy rights were being violated. My hope is simply that some day in the very near future, when this crisis has passed, we will return to the privacy rights that our founding fathers guaranteed us.” Spielberg made his rightward turn even clearer in another June 2002 interview: “I’m not an advocate of pulling back the CIA’s and the FBI’s far-reaching powers right now. I think this is a time of war, and they need to do what Lincoln did when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1862…. During times of war, things like that have to happen. What I’m worried about is when we have finally gone beyond the brink, where we are right now, and things start to settle down. Will the government pull back those powers of surveillance? Or are they going to say that’s the new standard for them? Like, ‘Hey, you’ve lived with them for five years. Sorry, folks, but that’s just the way it’s going to be from now on.’ I hope that doesn’t happen. That would be very sad. If this doesn’t end, then we’ll have to go back to the college campuses and hold up signs.”

Spielberg did not have the full courage of his artistic convictions. Like many liberal Democrats in that period, he even offered public support for Bush’s preemptive strike on Iraq. At a press conference promoting
Minority Report
in Rome, he said, “If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government,” adding that those policies were “solid and rooted in reality.” By 2005, Spielberg had come to his senses, telling the German magazine
Der Spiegel
, “I criticize the Iraq War, the restrictions placed on citizens’ freedom. I criticize it because I love my country.”