WALL-E (2008)
WALL-E is probably what most movie lovers pictured (and hoped for) when Steven Spielberg announced he was going to take on Stanley Kubrick’s long gestating Artificial Intelligence. The possibility of Kubrick’s controlled-chilly-distrustful sensibility mingling with Spielberg’s pop-genius-empathy was too rich for it to be anything other than troubled and disappointing. A.I. is a fascinating picture, and a powerful one-but that power comes partially from the friction of watching a misguided picture try to take hold. A.I. lacked Spielberg’s flair and confidence-it’s yet another of his apologies for being entertaining and profitable for so long; and also, less surprisingly, lacked Kubrick’s dry-comic ambiguity, that charge that comes from his elitist scold-his mastery of the triviality of the damned. A.I. was, in short, a summation of two master filmmakers’ weaknesses. What many of us wanted from A.I., whether it was C.C. (Cinephilically Correct) or not, was for Spielberg to return to the blissful wish-fulfillment fantasies of the late 1970s-early 1980s, to the pictures that had a sense of mystery and fullness-his pop miracles.
WALL-E promises, and just may be, that sort of pop wonder. The picture’s beginning gives us Earth hundreds of years in the future-an Earth that has finally succumbed to our distinctly American self-absorption-magic-bullet-quick-fix-pass-the-buck-supersize-my-fries entitlement. (WALL-E doesn’t acknowledge other national ideologies; this is a purely in-house reaction.) Earth is a tattered shambles: a ruined, still oddly beautiful series of cities of garbage; hopelessly tended to by one remaining robot, Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), an achingly small little contraption who clearly doesn’t grasp the impossibility of his aim. Wall-E, a love-child of E.T. and Johnny Five, scoops trash up into his belly, cubes it like a miniature crushed car, and spits it out-adding it to a column that will eventually yield yet another skyscraper of debris.
Summer films have become so hectic, so joyless, so overstuffed with incident and McGuffin, that you may find yourself quietly floored by WALL-E, particularly the beginning. The film’s resemblance to Kubrick, even counting the satire of the later acts, is superficial-a few jokes here and there and little more. WALL-E is a lotta Spielberg, a little Chaplin, a little Tati, but I’m shocked, and pleased, to write that the picture most clearly recalls the delicacy, patience and wit of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, particularly The Shop Around the Corner (remade, awfully, as You’ve Got Mail).
This picture approaches the romance that develops between Wall-E and Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a robot monitoring Earth’s progress towards inhabitability (she looks like a storm-trooper crossed with a Mac computer), with a Lubitschian grace and interest in minute gestures that speak volumes. The robots, one a labored little scuttle-bug hundreds of years in age, the other a sleek, armed new thing, play out a variation of the classic situation where a man is hopelessly enthralled with someone leagues above him. Eve, initially thinking Wall-E a menace, fires lasers at him until his gentleness, and complete lack of pretense, win her.
Robots in love. It sounds like kitsch, and could be, and, I’m sure, has been. Director Andrew Stanton understands the strength of the premise though, which is that you can go elemental. Robots aren’t human (obviously), and don’t have humans’ quirks and intangible hang-ups, so they can be allowed to stand for pure love without seeming mawkish. (The picture is remarkably, with only a few exceptions, un-cute.) With robots we can believe what we always want to believe in human romances without talking ourselves out of it and breaking the spell. The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here. There’s a scene early in Wall-E and Eve’s courtship where Wall-E shows her the various gadgets that he’s kept from the rubbish, unable to let go. We’ve already seen Wall-E’s collection, and his idea of what these objects are, but Eve, of greater power and knowledge, actually understands the use of the some of the knickknacks. She holds a lighter and produces fire; she holds Wall-E’s light bulb and produces light. This is among the most moving scenes in the film, because Stanton and the Pixar team have found, in pop-movie terms, an analogy for how we hope to discover ourselves in our lovers. The opening half of WALL-E is a lean, classical, melancholy daydream-a parable of finding something wonderful amidst an unrelentingly banal nightmare. Wall-E is, really, when it comes down to it, an indomitable working class stiff.
Then the picture takes us to space and to the future humans, who’ve become a surprisingly disgusting parody of our current ravenous addiction to techno-consumerism. At this point, around the halfway mark, WALL-E becomes considerably more conventional-it’s sharp and funny and sprightly, but that first half haunts the second half in a way that isn’t entirely beneficial. The picture is preaching against the ravages of Earth, but you find yourself ironically missing the ravaged Earth (this is somewhat intentional)-and missing the romance that was beautifully unencumbered by plot mechanics. Pixar breaks through in the opening passages, achieving the quiet, nearly existential power they’ve been flirting with for some time (most memorably, until now, in Toy Story 2).
The second half is simply a damn good Pixar movie (I’m risking ingratitude) and perhaps that opening isn’t possible to sustain, but I’m not so sure. There are still many moments even here that come through though: a kiss, a “dance” in space, as well as the humans’ discovery of fleeting, fleshy pleasures. Jeff Garlin eventually turns up as a Captain, and sketches an unexpectedly moving characterization of befuddled loss. And there’s the ending. The ending is a pure, authentic, cleansing, stunner. Wall-E and Eve remind one of the myth of the bumblebee: an insect that isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but, well, does anyway. Wall-E and Eve aren’t supposed to yearn, to care, to crave, but someone-thankfully-forgot to tell them.
★★★½
June 28th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
The thing about A.I. is that there’s no intellectual dilemma that a boy stealing a helicopter can’t fly his way out of. It also stacks the deck so that there’s no way to favor other than one side (Spielberg’s side) of the argument. That’s also a problem with Munich — that Spielberg is too arrogant to allow other perspectives. He suffers from the delusion of the omnipotent director.
Spielberg has always been a better feeler than a thinker, and I get the same vibe off of Wall-E. It really is E.T. esque.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Not having seen AI in its entirety to this day, I now don’t see any reason to. I loved WALL-E as much as you, and would rather just watch it again than muddle through Spielberg’s version.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I still think AI is a flawed masterpiece. The script’s a mess but it contains some of Spielberg’s most wrenching and awesome moments. Osmet is astounding and that Stan Winston Teddy rulez us all…
June 30th, 2008 at 11:22 am
K-I think you have a wonderful point-Spielberg is a brilliant raw nerve, but intellectually, his films can be a little troubling-or naive.
Daniel-Don’t take my word for it. You SHOULD see A.I. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, I think its scatterbrained and, in portions, idiotic, but Christian is right-some of Spielberg’s most daring and haunting scenes can be found in this picture, and its worth seeing. It’s (in my mind) a failure, but an honest, admirable one. I brought it up the way I did because, when I went to see A.I. I was yearning for a certain return to a certain wide-eyed purity in Spielberg’s storytelling, and, regardless of A.I.’s faults or accomplishments that most certainly DID NOT happen. In WALL-E it did, and it reminded me of what I’ve been missing so much in Spielberg, compounded by this summer’s cluttered, pandering INDY 4.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I agree with Christian, I think A.I. is a richer and more complex movie than it gets credit for - and it’s better than WALL-E.
July 1st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
“The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here.” Nice.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I haven’t seen Wall-E yet so I can’t comment there.
It may just be me getting defensive about Spielberg–it happens–but I really don’t think it’s altogether fair to on one hand say Spielberg has either lost his ability to return to the wide-eyed purity of, say, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or has become apologetic about it in his more recent films and that that’s a major artistic tragedy while on the other hand say Spielberg and his films are primarily only successful in terms of bathetic feeling.
To me, it’s mainly an issue of his deveopment. Many resent him for not being the same filmmaker he was in the early 1980s. Post-Schindler’s List especially, his films have been more “grown-up,” less wide-eyed, while maintaining at least considerable vestiges of the unmitigated wonder of his earlier films. It’s a dualism inherent in his entire filmography to a certain extent, but it’s been a pressure point strained all the more in his more recent work.
A.I. doesn’t share the relatively uncomplicated beauty of E.T., but I’d suggest it’s one of his crowning achievements.
You’ve Got Mail is atrocious. Lubitsch was spinning in his grave for a while after that one. Finally saw Sleepless in Seattle back in March, too, and after the thirty-minute mark I found it pretty terrible as well.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 am
JeffMcM and Alexander-It’s funny, I knew you guys were going to take me to task for some of those statements, and perhaps you should. I have no problem with Spielberg stretching and experimenting and allowing his sensibility to naturally shift-that’s an evolution that no artist should resist. It sometimes isn’t obvious, but Steven Spielberg is among my favorite filmmakers-period. And Alexander-you, in particular, have said some things in various posts, both mine and elsewhere, that I’ve really appreciated regarding this man.
My primary issue is that I don’t always buy the new Spielberg. It feels like an impression, like a child playing adult (MUNICH was a major step forward in this regard I thought). I do like, and considerably respect, A.I. That doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely didn’t buy one minute of it-one small example-the sex dialogue that introduces Gigolo Joe with the wife who gets him in trouble-the moment feels like it was written by a virgin.
The film has haunting, awe-inspiring, powerful imagery and the abandoning of David is among the most startling things Spielberg has ever staged (it feels like we’re, in that passage, getting to the root of most Spielberg movies) but the picture never sails, its in and out, up and down-it’s very much the work of a major filmmaker and an amateur screenwriter.
The adult performances-excluding Law-are routinely awful. A.I. has an issue (and it’s an issues that I mentioned about Woody Allen recently) and that’s that we don’t register the loss, the compromise of humanity-because we open in a sterile Hell already. If Spielberg truly wanted to be subversive-that first act would have had that primal zing of one of his earlier “entertainments” and would have slowly given way to something considerably more unsettling. Spielberg doesn’t do that-maybe by design, but maybe because his tone seems to be continuallly eluding him here anyway.
I don’t resent Spielberg’s right to change (though I understand you taking it that way)-I just don’t buy it yet. And Spielberg, particularly in that late 1980s-early 1990s period WAS apologetic about the nature of his work, he essentially said that much (and INDY 3 is a literal apology, for a film that needs none.)
Spielberg, as Kael said in that Sugarland review Christian referenced, is one of the most naturally brilliant filmmakers working. (I think it has the usual new Spielberg inconsistencies, but MINORITY REPORT is visually amazing-exhilarating and graceful-possibly my favorite of the newer films, though I think the sporadically brilliant WAR OF THE WORLDS is underrated too.)
I could go on and on-hope this cleared things up a little-I don’t want Spielberg to stunt his development, I just want him to reach it. The reference to A.I. in WALL-E was primarily meant to convey what I had, wrongly, hoped for in a film long ago-didn’t get-and finally got.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 am
I wasn’t really saying you resented Spielberg’s change or development, Chuck, because I think I’ve understood what you mean about him, just that I do think at least some criticism of him stems from critics who wish he’d go back to making arguably simpler, more immediately satisfying films.
Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate your opinions about Speielberg and everyone else, too. And I also appreciate your detailing of your own position even more. And your points about Spielberg clearly do illustrate how much you actually cherish him.
Regarding the late ’80s and early ’90s, I agree that after being burned by the reception, or lack thereof, for Empire of the Sun, Spielberg’s art went through a (fortunately brief) dip of sorts. His efforts all conveyed, to one degree or another, his frustration, “growing pains,” and a lack of satisfaction. And you’re right, the movies of that time felt at least half-apologetic and behave markedly less convincing than the majority of his films.
I actually have always liked, maybe even loved, Frances O’Connor and William Hurt very much in A.I. That they feel like performances Kubrick might have extracted while being completely at home in the Spielberg canon makes them all the more fascinating to me. I do know those performances, like the film itself, draw very divisive responses.
Looking forward to Wall-E… I saw Wanted and despised it, so I could use some kind of cleansing experience at a cinema after that.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:01 am
I saw it. I loved it. Magical.