Interzone 251 (20 page)

HER

ROBOCOP

A NEW YORK WINTER’S TALE

I, FRANKENSTEIN

47 RONIN

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

MR PEABODY & SHERMAN

THE LEGO MOVIE

Can we love what is not human? Will we? Should we? Must we? In a sense, we already do. Film is all about seducing us into loving the unreal, the dead, the Maschinenmensch, using our cognitive overspill to project on to the faces of the stars the illusion of inner life and being, as our hyperactive theory of mind already does for animals, toys, machines, and gods. But a singularity is approaching, where our relationships with imaginary friends outstrip our dwindling power to interact with living minds; where the worlds on our screens become more involving than the lives we inhabit and share, and our repertoire of affect dwindles as we fixate on ever more tailored and appealing simulations.

This is the wise, deep, and melancholic comic business of Spike Jonze’s cyber-romance 
HER
, which as we go to press has just become only the second science fiction film to win a screenplay Oscar (after
Eternal Sunshine
ten years earlier, though
Return of the King
did score a rather less deserved trophy the previous year). It’s an achievement the more extraordinary for what is Jonze’s first solo feature-writing credit. After two films and nearly a third with Charlie Kaufman, before the gruelling production on
Where the Wild Things Are
took Jonze out of directing
Synecdoche, New York
and he returned instead to the short subjects that had made his name – particularly 2010’s robot romance
I’m Here
with Andrew Garfield, who is thanked along with many other former collaborators here – he’s reinvented himself as a complete auteur without breaking the stride of his utterly unique and coherent body of directorial work.

The premise seems mild enough – unhappy divorcing midlife male falls for his next-generation AI operating system – but from the opening multiple reveal, it’s a film that springs piquant twists whenever you find yourself beginning to settle into thinking you know where it’s going. Jonze himself has talked the film down as sf and up as a film about relationships, which is certainly a level on which it works with a kind of grown-up wisdom not normally looked for in Hollywood. Nevertheless, if you could imagine everything you could reasonably want in a great terrestrial science fiction film, it would probably look a lot like
Her
. The most powerful and delicious cognitive frisson comes with the discovery that the story we’re watching on screen has not been the real story, which instead was the more lingering and affecting tale of invisible Samantha’s own reality, and her meticulously mapped evolution from a coy simulation of mind to a transcendent being beyond consciousness, body, comprehension, and (poignantly) human reach. The near-future scenario, set in a persuasive Shanghai-inflected (and -shot) future LA whose like we haven’t seen before, plays inventive changes on its theme of simulated feelings, from the hero’s day job as a ghostwriter of intensely affecting computer-handwritten personal letters to the metaphysical dilemmas of Samantha’s increasingly disruptive sense or pretence of her own reality and her negotiations with her own body envy.

It is, as well as a brilliantly played and directed film, a brilliantly written one. Every few minutes an idea comes along that you haven’t seen before, and Kaufman’s tutelage is especially apparent in the scenes of crosstalk between multiple realities, as when the hero tries to interact with a sweary and attitudinal VR game character while simultaneously carrying on an audio conversation with Samantha in which a third-party e-mail is embedded. Nevertheless, it’s tempting to suspect that the film couldn’t have ended up as affecting as it has without its necessarily innovative shooting technique (with Samantha’s lines recorded live but the actress screened from view) and the radical revision it then enabled in post (where Samantha Morton was replaced with Scarlett Johansson to salvage Jonze’s troubled three-hour rough cut). It’s a film that nobody else could have made, or written, or imagined, full of strange beauties, sad truths, and sweet mysteries. Who would ever have seen it coming?

Alex Murphy has to discover the man inside his own machine in Jose Padilha’s unexpectedly smart and resonant remake of 
ROBOCOP
, in which the Brazilian incomer brings to his Hollywood debut the same outsider’s squint at America that Verhoeven brought to his, but with an appropriately updated geopolitical spin and some unexpectedly deft use of the wife and child that the original film series so casually wrote away (though original writers Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier, still credited here, did reinstate Murphy Jr for the 1993 live-action TV series). The distinctive satirical element that Verhoeven and Neumeier wrought in their collaborations on
RoboCop
and
Starship Troopers
has wisely been judged inimitable, but is homaged by getting Samuel Jackson in for a morning of greenscreen to steal the show as a corporate-shill TV troll: “It is great to see American machines helping to promote peace and freedom abroad … Some of you may even think that the use of these drones overseas makes us the kind of bullying imperialists that our forefathers were trying to be!” (Bit on-the-hooter there, Sam, but thanks for stopping by.) Ingenious use is made of veteran rehabilitation narratives and a thumping intertextual evocation of Jake Sully’s rebirth, and there’s some clever, if ultimately copped-out-of, play with the modern illusion of free will: “Consciousness is nothing more than the processing of information. I can fix him and he won’t know the difference.” But the sequence that hands-up defines the film is an unflinchingly sustained display of exactly what is left of the organic Alex Murphy, which with any luck will give the PG-13 audience nightmares for life. That’s a legacy that any machine could be proud of.

Akiva Goldsman has done a brutal OmniCorp number on
Winter’s Tale
in what has now become 
A NEW YORK WINTER’S TALE
 for the UK, who are apparently at risk of confusing Mark Helprin’s fiercely-loved 1983 fantasy doorstop with more locally famous homonyms. It’s hard to think of an adaptation that has wrought quite such monstrously Procrustean mutilations on its source. Almost all the limbs and vital organs have been slashed away and replaced by Hollywood clockwork, leaving only the odd face, name, and extremity to gaze out at us from inside a mechanical body which reduces a living organic creation to a clumping thing of clonks and crashes. Like Alex Murphy’s hand, a solitary dialogue scene has randomly survived (the first interview between Colin Farrell’s heart-burglar Peter and William Hurt’s newsprint patriarch), along with a dreadfully distorted version of the romance of Peter Lake and Beverly Penn with a hilariously awkward new ending, and a drastically shrunken finale which entirely inverts the outcome of Peter’s final confrontation with Pearly Soames. None of these characters is easily playable, though the very able cast do all they can with what little Goldsman’s script has left them to play, which in the case of Jennifer Connelly’s Virginia Gamely is nothing at all. Most of the supports seem to be favours called in from Goldsman’s past writing gigs (two from
A Beautiful Mind
, one from
Lost in Space
, and that chap from
I, Robot
and
I Am Legend
in a new role so gloriously wrong in conception and execution that it’s almost worth seeing the film to have been there).

It would be easy to say that a
Winter’s Tale
from the writer of
Batman and Robin
was always going to be a match as blessed as Joel Schumacher’s
Lanark
or Michael Bay’s
Little, Big
, but I’m actually not sure Goldsman is principally to blame. It’s all too evident that this film has had to be accountable to a system which is populated by people who are congenitally incapable of reading, let alone seeing the point of, 700 pages of überliterary magic realism. The novel is unfilmable not because it’s long, literary, prodigal with wonders, and overstays its welcome by a third or so, but because it can’t be experienced at second-hand. How would you even pitch it? “A thief on the run from his former boss has a
coup de foudre
with a dying heiress and falls through a timewarp with a magic horse to emerge eighty years later, work a few miracles, and die when a bridge to heaven fails and the city burns and is reborn.” That’s not really a story in the simple sense that Hollywood understands, nor is it really what most of the book is or is about, which is rather a century-spanning hyperDickensian fantasy of an impossible New York populated by generations of impossible characters in “the season in which time was superconductive”. But the pitch is all the executives hear, and so we strangely find ourselves in a film where characters bearing names from the novel are caught up in a cheesy by-numbers plot about demons in the service of Lucifer trying to prevent a pair of lovers from cashing in a miracle, which ends with the character who doesn’t die in the book getting killed by the one who does. “I may be just a mechanic,” says our hero, “but what are we if not machines?” Alex Murphy would have his own answer to that one.

Pretty much the same plot reappears from another screenwriter-turned-director stuffing a classic text up the crack of a Valentine’s turkey in Stuart Beattie’s 
I, FRANKENSTEIN
, which goes one further than
Winter’s Tale
in symbolically setting fire to the original novel – or at least the parts of it constituting Victor Frankenstein’s journal – on screen. The credits offer “Special thanks to Mary Shelley”, who would certainly feel thanked in a very special way by this new pandemonium from the mind of
Underworld
confabulator Kevin Grevioux. The film opens promisingly enough in the Arctic darkness and distance of the novel’s last page, with the monster left with his maker’s corpse and literary MacGuffin (“Victor’s journal is written proof that God is no longer the sole creator of man”), but then drawn into a bizarre gothic war between demons and gargoyles with God-playing scientists in revolt against a scientist-playing God, casually skipping a couple of centuries before the main event as Miranda Otto’s gargoyle queen takes on Bill Nighy’s galvanic army with the monster and his blonde labcoated hookup caught in the crossfire. “I understand you probably suffered severe brain damage during the reanimation process,” she tells him at a moment of particularly radical absurdity, and that’s certainly the fate of Mary’s creation here. Beattie, who was one of the original architects of the
Pirates of the Caribbean
franchise before the Elliot/Rossio takeover, made an exemplary directorial debut with his sensitive 2010 adaptation of John Marsden’s Australian YA classic
Tomorrow, When the War Began
, and recycles several of that film’s leads in supporting roles. But they haven’t been enough to save its resurrected flesh from a tomatometer rating of 96% rotting.