If it is the scientist’s job to reveal the magic and the myths of the material world to us, then perhaps it is the artist’s job to materialise our innate magic and myths. Once in a blue moon an artist comes along who adds to that store of tales that reverberate in the collective unconscious, but there is nothing wrong with updating the tales of yore that send our children to dreamland.
Which more or less brings us to Steven Spielberg, whose AI: Artificial Intelligence is clearly a free adaptation of the fairy tale Pinocchio. AI was originated by Stanley Kubrick, who probably couldn’t get past not knowing exactly how a machine could love, and at least had the intellectual honesty to pass it on to his pal, Steven.
So, a husband and wife (Sam Robards and Frances O’Connor) have lost their only son, who is literally on ice until he can be brought back to life. But they are given a chance to have a machine-child (Haley Joel Osment), programmed to love them. The “child” loves the mother unconditionally, which is as frightening but flattering in real life as it is plain terrifying when it is done by the miraculous Osment on screen.
Spielberg gives AI a deeply Freudian twist, letting the mother reject the “child” David, so that he can spend the rest of the movie searching for her — and then Spielberg does to the delightful O’Connor what he seems to do to most women: he turns her into a dowdy housewife.
This and most of the set design and William Hurt’s disappointing performance are AI‘s greatest failings. But in David’s journey that old mythical stuff starts happening, and we are swept along emotionally — it helps having a son whose energy, mischief and obsession with his mother verge on the obscene.
David’s encounter with Gigolo Joe (a brilliantly mechanical performance from Jude Law) and his journey to “the end of the world”, a submerged Manhattan, become our own quests, odysseys, dreams, nightmares and collective memories.
Maybe we must choose between what the scientist and the artist see. The former sees the human as a machine that procreates and dies or is copied, whereas a flawed artist like Spielberg sees the human, real or copied, as the carrier of a soul that lives forever as a child, a human being.