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271 The Best of Both Worlds A.I. Artificial Intelligence If the best movies are often those that change the rules, Steven Spielberg’s sincere, cockeyed, serious, and sometimes masterful realization of Stanley Kubrick ’s ambitious late project deserves to be a contender. All of Kubrick’s best films fall into one vexing category—they’re strange, semi-identified objects that we’re never quite prepared for. They’re also the precise opposite of Spielberg’s films, which ooze cozy familiarity even before we’ve figured out what they are or what they’re doing to us. If A.I. Artificial Intelligence—a film whose split personality is apparent even in its two-part title—is as much a Kubrick movie as a Spielberg one, this is in large part because it defamiliarizes Spielberg, makes him strange. Yet it also defamiliarizes Kubrick, with equally ambiguous results— making his unfamiliarity familiar. Both filmmakers should be credited for the results—Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick’s intentions while making it a profoundly personal work.∞ I can’t agree with colleagues who label A.I. a failure because it’s neither fish nor fowl—by which they often mean a failed Spielberg movie, not a successful or even semisuccessful Kubrick one. Neither fish nor fowl strikes me as precisely what a good SF movie should be; it’s certainly what 2001: A Space Odyssey was when it opened in 1968 before puzzled viewers, myself included. (Of course, 2001 qualifies as a stranger-than-usual Kubrick film, so perhaps it belongs in a different category altogether.) When David Denby writes in the New Yorker, ‘‘Whatever is wrong with A.I.— and a great deal is wrong—it’s the first American movie of the year made by an artist,’’ he’s not only trashing the work of hundreds of filmmakers whose work he hasn’t seen—which must come from yearning for a world much simpler than our own, a yearning Spielberg generally speaks to. He’s also making it clear that he has only one artist in mind, and it isn’t Kubrick. Denby treated Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final film, with the kind of dismissive contempt that would have seemed excessive if it had been ladled on a James Bond feature, and I can only surmise that, for him, Kubrick doesn’t even qualify as a bad artist, alive or dead. So Denby must have been hoping for another Spielberg film, much as I was hoping—even less realistically—for another Kubrick. But only if you accept that 272 ESSENTIAL CINEMA A.I. can satisfy neither expectation will you understand the film’s special achievements , which include redefining and expanding our sense of both filmmakers. In fact, I find A.I. so fascinating, affecting, and provocative that I don’t much care whether it’s a masterpiece—a verdict that won’t be determined for months or years anyway, and that would be useful right now mainly to exhibitors and DreamWorks executives. The example of both filmmakers’ previous works and their often hysterical receptions should have taught us the folly of hasty evaluations . How many people are still calling 2001 ‘‘stupid’’ and ‘‘a celebration of copout ,’’ as Pauline Kael did, or Saving Private Ryan the film ‘‘to end all wars,’’ as the New Yorker trumpeted on a cover wraparound? Calling a movie a masterpiece is in some cases little more than an impatient desire to close off discussion of its ambiguities and uncertainties, to deny that it’s a living, and therefore evolving, work of art. A.I., which often resembles two slightly distorting mirrors facing each other, is likely to unsettle and confound us for some time to come—and that’s entirely to its credit. Unlike Denby, I don’t think that Spielberg’s being an artist places him in some special category, and the flag-waving hypocrisy of Saving Private Ryan is one of the examples I could cite as a dubious use of his artistry. Given the different kinds of art they’ve made, I also wonder whether it’s possible to reconcile the values of a ‘‘successful’’ Spielberg with those of a ‘‘successful’’ Kubrick in the same film. A.I. is, unavoidably, something of a shotgun marriage, though that’s what allows it to defamiliarize Kubrick and Spielberg. A.I. is one of the most poetic and haunting allegories...

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