Originally posted by: Obi-wonton
A.I.'s naysayers sometimes admitted an almost androidal sangfroid, to the point of saying they just couldn't feel for David (Haley Joel Osment) because he's a robot, albeit an advanced model designed to love parents who've lost children in a near-future plague. Alas, the critical resistance is real. But they are not. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies? For starters, seeing David as merely mechanical and finally unworthy of emotional investment denies the basis of representational art and metaphor. This dumbfounding objection offends the essence of storytelling. Should a child detach from Pinocchio's fate because he is, after all, just wood? Isn't E.T. at best a believable fantasy, at worst a teardrop-proof rubber puppet? A modest proposal: David's most obvious meaning is Man. He's an avatar of human experience, yearning, and will to perfect himself before his Creator. With A.I. Spielberg tells the oldest newest story: Man's search for meaning.
A.I.'s naysayers sometimes admitted an almost androidal sangfroid, to the point of saying they just couldn't feel for David (Haley Joel Osment) because he's a robot, albeit an advanced model designed to love parents who've lost children in a near-future plague. Alas, the critical resistance is real. But they are not. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies? For starters, seeing David as merely mechanical and finally unworthy of emotional investment denies the basis of representational art and metaphor. This dumbfounding objection offends the essence of storytelling. Should a child detach from Pinocchio's fate because he is, after all, just wood? Isn't E.T. at best a believable fantasy, at worst a teardrop-proof rubber puppet? A modest proposal: David's most obvious meaning is Man. He's an avatar of human experience, yearning, and will to perfect himself before his Creator. With A.I. Spielberg tells the oldest newest story: Man's search for meaning.
I used to be in this camp, and attributed my utter detachment from A.I. to the idea that it's hard to empathize with programmed or hard-wired emotions. But in essence, isn't a child's devotion to his or her parents hard-wired, in a sense? I totally agree with the first point made above, but I now realize that for me, everything rides on my inability to empathize with Osment's performance, specifically. Regardless of the details behind his character, I find him endlessly creepy and false as an actor. The difficulty in comparing David with Pinocchio or E.T. is that, despite the unreality of the latter two characters, their performances are infinitely more expressive and authentically 'human' than Osment's. If another child had played David, one who didn't strive so hard to be 'robotic', I would probably have been on board. Perhaps that's all Osment can do... has anyone seen Secondhand Lions? It's as if he's still playing David, only older, more awkward, and inexplicably stuck in the 1950's midwest.