CD Review: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence ****

JOHN WILLIAMS

Wea/Warner Bros. 9 48096-2

13 tracks - 7:11

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence puts Spielberg and Williams back in the science fiction mode that neither has truly explored since Close Encounters, and the results are fascinating, contradictory and often deeply moving -- just like the controversial, audience-splitting movie itself. Spielberg's film, a project long under development by the late Stanley Kubrick, explores nothing less than the nature of human behavior and emotions in a strangely intimate, unflinching epic format. The central character is a robot programmed to love, and that central oxymoron addresses not only the contradictions and limitations of human relationships, but also the collision of Spielberg's delirious romanticism and Kubrick's cold-eyed analysis of human frailties.

One challenge for both Spielberg and Williams in tackling A.I. was that Kubrick had essentially abandoned the idea of the conventional underscore in his film projects in the mid 1960s, when he dumped an elaborate Alex North score for 2001 in favor of a collection of classical recordings. While Kubrick sometimes commissioned composers like Wendy Carlos and even his daughter Abigail Mead to write music for later films, he largely eschewed any synchronized musical accompaniment for more abstract applications. With its themes of robotics and the disconnects between human beings, A.I. would seem an unlikely candidate for a Williams score. But ultimately, the stamp of Williams and Spielberg on this project deepens what might have been a relentlessly cold look at humankind.

Williams' nod to the Kubrick approach to music is to provide an eclectic and progressive score that references Kubrick's earlier work (in the Katchaturian-styled "Cybertronics" cue that echoes Kubrick's use of the Gayane Ballet Suite in 2001), in his nods to minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich in cues like "Hide and Seek" and "Abandoned in the Woods," and in his explosive, John Adams-like scoring of the robot boy David's penultimate journey to find his creator ("The Mecha World"). Williams also employs a quote from another Strauss waltz, this time Der Rosenkavelier, interpolated as David and Gigolo Joe cross the bridge into Rouge City. Reportedly Kubrick had long wanted to use Der Rosenkavelier in a film and had contemplated working it into his production of A.I. at some point, and Spielberg and Williams chose to add it to their collaboration as one of many salutes to Kubrick. One of the confounding elements of critical and audience reaction to A.I. is the often-made assumption that Spielberg simply threw his own elements into the movie arbitrarily (including, many viewers would have you believe, the entire final third of the picture) with no regard for what Kubrick intended. While there are differences between Kubrick's version and Spielberg's, they aren't as obvious as you'd expect.

The A.I. album substantially reworks the score, in the great tradition of Williams' work on Jaws and E.T. -- purists will find many elements of the actual film score missing or modified on the album, which tends to focus on the music from the second half of the film. "The Mecha World" opens the album thrillingly, although its placement and title are misleading. "Abandoned in the Woods" condenses the cue for one of the film's pivotal scenes into a more coherent and powerful piece of concert music. The biggest changes to existing music come in "Rouge City," which opens with the film version of "Abandoned in the Woods" before moving to a brief, anticipatory section (presumably Jude Law's character sweet-talking a few young men into driving him and David across the bridge into Rouge City) and finally a smaller-scale revision of "The Mecha World." The actual strains of Der Rosenkavelier are missing, although whether that's due to rights issues or last-minute changes to this cue is unclear. The Strauss isn't the only music missing from the album -- Williams' theme for David, arguably the most important theme in the first half of the film, is, remarkably, nowhere to be found on music editor Ken Wannberg's album presentation. There's also a wealth of memorable incidental music that's been left off in favor of countless arrangements of "Monica's Theme."

Much of the film's final third is intact on CD, although not presented in film order. Often scored for solo piano and the solo vocalist Barbara Bonney, the score's resolving moments are haunting, poetic, and as deeply emotive as anything in Williams' repertoire -- but they may depend for their emotional effect on whether or not you buy the film's denouement. Williams' approach can logically be argued to be the very antithesis of Kubrick's use of music in film: oddly, Kubrick commonly played pieces of classical music on the set to evoke an emotional reaction from his actors, but he rarely seemed to use music manipulatively on film itself. Instead, his choice of music often formed an ironic counterpoint to the actions onscreen. For A.I., Williams seems to score straight to the robot David's emotions -- but are David's emotions real, and is Williams scoring actual feelings, the potential for feelings or the tragedy of behavior that recreates the appearance of feelings but isn't really? If that ambiguity bothers you, you can take solace in the album's two song adaptations of the end title melody, which helpfully reduce the film's potential existentialism to unmitigated schmaltz. A.I.'s dim box-office reception probably means we won't be seeing an expanded A.I. special edition CD anytime soon, so better enjoy this truncated but still beautiful version while you can.
 

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com