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| Williams |
A.I. Artificial Intelligence: (John Williams) A
complicated and convoluted concept in each of its numerous side stories,
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is essentially a film about a boy's
love for his mother. In the time between Brian Aldiss' original story of
1969 and Steven Spielberg's realization of the adaptation in 2001, famed
director Stanley Kubrick continuously toiled with
A.I.. After
several unsuccessful attempts to begin production on the film in
earnest, Kubrick eventually shelved the idea in the 1980's until such a
time that special effects technology could meet his extremely high
standards for the look of his vision. When he saw the stunning effects
of
Jurassic Park, he determined that the time had come to make
A.I., but despite engaging Industrial Light & Magic and
approaching Steven Spielberg to direct, he proceeded to make
Eyes
Wide Shut first. That decision unfortunately meant that the director
died before being able to turn his attention squarely on
A.I.,
and to honor Kubrick's career, Spielberg went ahead and tackled the
project himself. While his involvement ensured topnotch technical
qualities, the conflicting emotional sensibilities of Kubrick and
Spielberg led to several problems in the script as it was executed.
Through the years, Kubrick had darkened the story by several shades,
eventually deciding on the basic premise of the controversial epilogue
that mostly survived intact. The challenge with
A.I. has always
been the on-screen battle between Kubrick's strikingly cold outlook on
the human/robot relationship and Spielberg's hopelessly optimistic
alternative in how he shoots scenes. Thus, the soft ending of
A.I., as well as several smaller plot points in between, is in
conflict with the chilly atmosphere of Kubrick's vision because
Spielberg essentially romanticized the concept, whether intentionally or
not, to improve its appeal. Some have claimed that the director also
extended the "Pinocchio" connections (which Kubrick nurtured all
along) into an allegory about the historical fight between the Romans
and the Jews. So many divergent accounts of the "facts" involving the
circumstances behind the creation of
A.I. exist that it's
pointless to belabor them much further. The film ultimately earned its
grosses through Spielberg's reputation rather than stellar critical
response.
What does matter is that
A.I., for all its efforts
to provoke thought, is both a beautifully enchanting and frightfully
offensive film at the same time. Since these two seemingly incongruous
descriptors are ultimately the downfall of the picture, they have to be
explored in order to understand the extreme contrasts in John Williams'
music for it. Many readers have disparaged the following statement
through the years, but
A.I. really does give listeners a hint as
to what a collaboration between Kubrick and the maestro would have
sounded like. The underlying social commentary of the concept,
hauntingly brutal in a way that few could create as well as Kubrick,
guides the basis of the story. The sappiness of the film is the
influence of Spielberg's usual attempt to infuse a sense of magic into
such fantasy topics, causing a variety of screaming fallacies of logic
and a tone in the ending that was destined to be classified as nothing
short of unsatisfying no matter how it was rewritten. Whatever interest
that could be maintained by the future conflict between orgas (people)
and mechas (robots) is restrained and diluted by the simple fact that
the concept of an unloving and incapable mother who abandons one who
loves her dearly is devastatingly depressing and disturbing to watch. In
this case, a young boy robot is programmed to unconditionally love a
couple whose biological child is ill and incapacitated. When the real
child is miraculously cured, the mother intentionally abandons the mecha
child in the woods. That boy (joined by his equally lovable, talking
teddy bear, whose fate at the end of the journey also remains sadly
unresolved) is the first model that can feel emotions, and to see him
spend the rest of the film in a fruitless attempt to find his mother is
frankly the offensive part of the story. Both Kubrick and Spielberg
intended to allow the robot to find her for one last fleeting moment,
but that conclusion, whether it had followed Kubrick's extremely
depressing variant of Spielberg's ultimately soft and fuzzy death scene
(of sorts), damns humanity in ways more vile than even concepts like
Soylent Green could suggest. This intense dissatisfaction with
A.I., as basically a glorified child abandonment picture, has a
strong and strangely distancing effect on the opinion of Williams'
score. It should not be surprising that Williams and Spielberg had
difficulty applying music to this context, in part because of Kubruck's
own surviving parameters.
The final incarnation of
A.I. creates the difficult
position of causing one to be utterly repulsed by the film while loving
the score despite its specific contributions to the worst parts of the
film's ultimate plot failures. In other words, Williams' music is an
extremely effective contributing factor to the offensive emotional
chains that the film throws around you, so you can either loathe it for
accentuating those traits in the film or love it for its individually
gorgeous parts. When you look back at the basic circumstances of this
production, it's hard not to get the impression that Williams was
confronted with the most problematic aspects of the script more than any
other crew member, forced to write a coherent score that satisfied both
the dark and light elements of the two directors' influences on the
story. Williams had scored the darker sides of humanity before, but
never for a film in which there is no redeeming quality for any human
character.
A.I. is nothing short of a suspense and horror film
for most of its running time, and the heroes are an unlikely trio of
robots (if you include the teddy bear and "Gigolo Joe"). The closest
Williams had ventured to the same general sense of disturbed suburban
lifestyles was for
Presumed Innocent, which remains the most
similar score to
A.I. in Williams' career in terms of grim tone.
The quiet, unnerving terror of the sickening domestic failure in
A.I. is even more tragic than the spookier revelations of
Presumed Innocent, but Williams handles them similarly. His use
of a piano to represent the symbol of the mecha boy and his family is
not a revolutionary technique, but Williams has a particularly effective
method of combining it with the woodwind and string sections to create
optimistic harmony in theme while being offset by underlying disharmony
in other layers of the orchestra. The first half of
A.I.,
embroiled in the extremely distasteful and unpleasant inactions of the
family that has adopted the artificial boy, has very few optimistic
scenes to offer, and Williams lays on the suspense very well, continuing
the plucking uncertainty from
Presumed Innocent with much skill.
Just as unpleasant as the film is to digest in that first half,
Williams' music for those scenes is equally unnerving on album. The
composer's handling of themes in these portions is minimal and
fragmented, the identities for the boy and robots in general so diluted
as to be ineffectual, likely an intentional choice, leaving
foreshadowings of later impactful identities as the only fleeting
anchors in these portions.
When the film suddenly transforms into the more expected
Kubrick mold of bizarre imagery and illogic, Williams' music becomes an
increasingly interesting listening experience (both in the film and on
album). A terrifying and urgent theme that mirrors some of the discord
heard when manipulating the innocence of Anakin's thematic material in
the first two
Star Wars prequels is applied to the uncertainty of
the mecha world from the viewpoint of the boy once he is abandoned.
Heard most extensively in "Abandoned in the Woods" and "Rouge City,"
this theme is accompanied by an underlying, tumultuous string motif,
rising and falling with almost a mechanical brutality that culminates
into a dissonant crescendo complete with seemingly random piano strikes.
This material had been used extensively in the trailers for the film,
and it accompanies the horrifying chase sequences quite well. It evokes
the same emotions as the most terrifying moments of
E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial's chase through the woods, and its boiling nature
can double in
A.I. to represent the massive, rising seas that
have engulfed much of the planet. This abandonment motif originates
earlier in the score in distinct
Presumed Innocent shades, both
"David Studies Monica" and, more poignantly, "Monica's Plan"
building momentum towards that pivotal moment with explorations of that
theme. The film's "Flesh Fair" scene, perhaps raising the most
intriguing overarching social issues of the story, is accompanied by the
"What About Us?" song by Ministry, and although it is thankfully not
included on the Williams score album, it was available almost
immediately on the group's "greatest hits" compilation. The "Rouge
City" cue contains the most impressive writing that Williams applies to
the outwardly Kubrick aspects of the story, though the composer's
unyielding, brassy fright in such cues as "Cybertronics" and "The
Moon Rising" offer a harsher electronic side of his writing that
Kubrick might even have appreciated in coordination with his traditional
classical styles. The latter cue is famous for its wicked electric
guitar contributions, ones that made the subsequent, brief use of the
instrument in
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones seem mild. Much of
this challenging, tumultuous atmosphere was destined to fester greatly
in Williams'
War of the Worlds a few years later. The composer
and director specifically opted to avoid thematic usage during many of
these passages, Williams instead writing singular ideas for locations
and situations as he would in
Star Wars: Revenge of the
Sith.
While Williams' music for
A.I. is overshadowed by
the power of the story for the first hour or so of the film, it begins
to assert itself after the mecha boy is abandoned, and it predictably
toggles over to the sappy, sentimental, typically-Spielberg side of the
story's emotions for the controversial ending of the film. It is this
last half hour of material that is almost too bittersweet to love, but
too lovely to ignore. The film's fatal inability to choose between a
concentration on the larger social issues of the plot or the dreams of
the mecha boy is what causes the ending of the film and score to be a
disappointment in construct, even if it is enticingly pretty in its
rendering. As Kubrick would have had it, there certainly wouldn't have
been a joyful fulfillment of dreams at the end of the story (at least
not an uncompromised one; Kubrick wanted to force the boy to watch his
mother immediately die before him), and Spielberg's seeming urge to tie
a nice big bow on the package caused Williams to follow suit. The score
becomes unequivocally harmonious in its final half hour, leaving behind
all of the challenging, Kubrick-inspired aspects of the score and film
that had made both somewhat interesting. Williams establishes the
mother-like female vocals of Barbara Bonney, operatic in performance, to
represent both the concept of the Blue Fairy and the mecha boy's
unwavering love for his adopting mother, the two actual main themes for
the picture. With that voice, the score takes on an almost religious
tone of fantasy, combining with the piano from the beginning of the
score (performing the mother's theme) to provide a hauntingly beautiful
aural sense for the remarkable visuals of the final sequence. Why
Williams utilizes two separate themes for these concepts is curious,
though the primary one is obviously the theme for the boy's programmed
love for his mother, while his search for her is interrupted by a
singular theme for the larger existential issues at hand, embodied to a
point by the Blue Fairy he is destined to find submerged in the film's
bridge between eras (but eventually being pegged to the species of
characters discovered at the end of the story). On album, these moments,
in tandem with the two song renditions of Williams' main mother's theme
(entitled "For Always"), allow for an extremely pleasant listening
experience, regardless of their connection to dissatisfying elements in
the plot. Still, in the film, the heart-wrenching and hopeless portrayal
of humanity causes the music to become secondary until the very last
scenes and the end credits, during which Williams' score finally
announces itself for the first time to an audience bombarded for two
hours with emotionally disturbing turns of events. As such, "For
Always" almost seems too pleasant for the occasion.
There is a point at which music can attempt to sugar
coat a film to such a degree of saturation that it actually becomes
noticeably obnoxious in its beauty, and
A.I. is a rare
transgression of this kind for Williams. Whatever the flaws that inhabit
this score, they are the fault of the extremely problematic plotline of
the film. Williams got caught in the middle of a story torn in two
opposite directions, and he did his best to score each scene
appropriately. Thus, whatever failure of the music cannot be considered
his fault, and the score earned him another Academy Award nomination in
a very competitive year. The underlying horror in his music prevails for
the majority of the work, following the extremely frustrating twists of
the film with skill. It has been suggested that Williams borrowed motifs
significantly for
A.I., including minimalistic material from
Steve Reich, vocal segments taken from Gyorgy Ligeti, and rhythms of
strings from Philip Glass. Reports indicate that some influences
actually came from the notes of Kubrick himself, and kudos are owed to
Williams and Spielberg for any attempts to honor such wishes. They
struggled mightily with finding the right tone for especially the end of
the picture, Williams recording several different variations of the two
lovely themes with and without the operatic vocals. The composer also
tested the utilization of the vocals during the "red herring" cue,
"What is Your Wish," that features the Blue Fairy but not the theme
originally associated with her. The composer and director also found
difficulty in approaching the applications of the mother's theme in
early sequences ("Canoeing With Pinocchio") and in the level of
brutality conveyed with the music in "Abandoned in the Woods," which
ultimately went far darker in depth than William's original vision for
the cue. You also have a strained identity on woodwinds for the teddy
bear, heard most significantly at the end of "Wearing Perfume," and
there remains disappointment that this identity did not itself receive
any kind of complimentary resolution in the final moments of the score
given that character's important presence there. To that point, Williams
really doesn't succeed at all in
A.I. in mingling his identities,
instead choosing to use pinpoint self-contained placements. This
separation is a bit of a disappointment, as this score, more than most,
could have used some merging of melodic structures to denote
appropriately intertwined concepts. The lack of any resolution for the
themes for the boy and teddy bear at the end, while those identities may
have intentionally been meant for orphaning, begs question about their
need to exist at all, especially given the wishy-washy, nebulous
character of so much of the other early music in the score.
Ultimately,
A.I. suffers from the unhappy and
ultimately hopeless fate of the characters in the film, a depressing
work due to the crushing weight of its own melodramatic heart in the
later sections. The original album, though including a DVD audio option,
has always been a source of dissatisfaction for Williams' collectors,
some unhappy over its short length, others quibbling with the choice of
cues and their random ordering, and even a few claiming that the product
was artificially spiced for a more commercially upbeat audience
expecting the maestro's romanticism in full. While it was a lengthy
album, there remained many important cues missing, and those included
are indeed very much out of film order. Williams arranged the tracks so
that all of the unpleasant material is located at the start of the
album, leaving four tracks of the hope-inspiring variety at the end. The
enjoyable song performances were a commercial vehicle for the album, and
at least Josh Groban's voice was fresh at the time. A rare 2-CD Oscar
promo for
A.I. included some of the weightier omissions, and fans
eventually created very comprehensive bootlegs of the score, some
ranging onto 3 CDs. In 2015, La-La Land Records made that 3-CD
presentation official, offering an impressively loyal, three-hour
arrangement of both the score as heard in the film on two CDs and a
third CD of alternates, album cuts, and the song variants. No matter
your opinion about the glories and flaws of
A.I. in context, this
limited 2015 product was a must-have for Williams collectors, exposing
more of the composer's toil even if it sheds light on mostly non-melodic
portions. The two "Journey Through the Ice" cues are essentially
atmospheric choral haze suited to a Kubrick film, and the string mystery
of "Cybertronics" is extended in tone throughout a few other cues.
Enthusiasts of the score's most effective theme, however, the one for
abandonment, will cheer the additional performances of its vintage
Williams creepiness, highlighting once again how the composer can
utilize a benign instrument like a piano with such piercing malice.
Ultimately, if you haven't seen the disturbing film, then the
combination of the score's romantically accessible cues ("Where Dreams
Are Born," "The Search for the Blue Fairy," and "The Reunion")
makes for a very strong twenty minutes of easy listening. A 2021 La-La
Land limited re-issue initially pressed the wrong masters, releasing
some desirable alternate music before being pulled and replaced with a
corrected re-issue of the 2015 set. If you've been bludgeoned by the
horrifying, illogical plot of the story, however, then perhaps you might
have a more difficult time appreciating especially the longer album
presentation. In either case,
A.I. is a rare Williams score that
functions better on album than in its overplayed role in a heavily
flawed film.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on the Albums: ****
- Overall: ****
| Bias Check: |
For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.68
(in 91 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.54
(in 363,495 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert of the 2001 Warner album includes the usual short note from
Spielberg, but no extra information about the score or film. Those of the 2015
and 2021 products contain extensive notation about both, including a list of
performers. During the delay of the 2021 album's release, La-La Land issued the
following explanation: "There was a manufacturing error with Disc 1 and Disc 3
of our A.I. 20th Anniversary Reissue which resulted in the wrong master being
featured on those discs. We are pausing future sales of this title until the
corrected sets are in stock."
