Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction fable is deeply moving, despite its wandering story and over-explanation. Haley Joel Osment makes a manufactured child’s hunger for love painfully convincing.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a deeply moving science-fiction film with a story that does not always know when to move on. Steven Spielberg takes a robot boy programmed to love and asks what responsibility that places on anyone receiving his affection. It is an uncomfortable basis for an adventure, and we would not mistake the presence of a child for a promise of reassurance. The film earns our sympathy for David before it asks us to think through the consequences of making him.
Haley Joel Osment gives David an earnestness that becomes distressing because he seems incapable of protecting himself. We were moved more than we expected by his need for love: knowing that somebody has put it there does nothing to lessen his vulnerability. Osment makes us worry about the child without forgetting that he has been manufactured. There is nothing knowing in the performance to reassure us that David can shrug off rejection.
Janusz Kamiński’s photography encourages that uneasy scrutiny, making David look slightly out of place in the world around him. We keep looking at the boy, trying to decide what difference his artificiality should make to our response. Rick Carter’s production design gives the imagined future enough substance for the question to survive outside the dialogue. The scale and intricacy are impressive, but the images are most effective when they leave us feeling that David has no secure place in them. Spielberg makes this invented world inhospitable enough that exploring it becomes a source of anxiety.
Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe provides a welcome change of energy around that central performance. Law understands the usefulness of charm in a film so preoccupied with need, and his presence keeps the solemnity from becoming uniform. John Williams’s score is less consistently helpful. It gives David’s longing a tenderness we respond to, then sometimes presses the emotion when Osment has already done enough. We wanted more room to sit with the discomfort before the music encouraged us to feel for him.
The larger weakness is the episodic screenplay, also Spielberg’s, which repeatedly makes the film feel as though it is starting again. Michael Kahn’s editing cannot quite make its separate stretches gather force as a single journey. At 146 minutes, the repeated explanations become wearing, especially when the images have already made the emotional situation clear. The narration is an unnecessary reassurance that we have understood. Spielberg seems reluctant to let an unsettling image or a difficult question go unexplained.
The critical consensus is substantially cooler than our judgement, and we think it gives the uneven storytelling too much weight. The objection that a manufactured child cannot deserve such feeling seems particularly unpersuasive. People made him capable of attachment, and that surely increases their obligation to him. As science fiction, the film is at its most disturbing when it asks us to consider that responsibility without allowing us to dismiss David as equipment.
Do not approach this as a comforting adventure simply because its central figure looks eleven. The question of what adults owe a child has a sharpness here that the technical wonders cannot soften. Choose it when neither of you needs cheering up.
