Greg Pak's old school sci-fi.
Robot Stories is more reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's character-based science fiction from the 40s and 50s, when Mars often resembled Ohio, or one of those threadbare Twilight Zone episodes where an extraterrestrial conveniently posed as a droll fellow in a black suit. To use a pop music metaphor: If Minority Report is a Phil Spector Wall of Sound album, Robot Stories is a four-track demo recorded in the bathroom. Yet the end result resonates more powerfully than most science fiction stories told on a grander scale. From start to finish, it's clear that we're in the hands of a director who knows that a good idea is the best special effect of all.
Pak actually has four good ideas here, each compressed into a tantalizingly open-ended tale. The first episode, "My Robot Baby," follows a thirtysomething professional couple (Tamlyn Tomita and James Saito) as they try to adopt a child; for unspecified reasons, the government in this future world refuses to approve would-be adoptive couples until they've spent some time caring for a robot baby (kind of like that old high school health class experiment where students carry an egg around for a week without breaking it).
The second, "The Robot Fixer," finds a mother (Wai Ching Ho) trying to reconnect with her estranged son, who's in a coma following a car accident, by reconstructing a decimated set of toy robots he played with when he was a child. Episode three, "Machine Love," foretells a world where humanoid robots have been enlisted to do much of the economy's grunt work, and episode four, "Clay," finds a dying old sculptor (the great character actor Sab Shimono) pressured by family members to "scan" the contents of his brain so that they can be preserved in mechanical or electronic form after his death.
What's remarkable about each of these episodes is their fidelity to human emotion, and their insistence on not resolving the issues they raise. Pak lets his characters (and his actors) shoulder the brunt of each tale's meanings. He denies them big speeches that sum everything up, insisting that we create our own interpretations by watching the characters behave. (Much of the film is built around close-ups of people thinking?about what, they refuse to say.)
The result is an anthology in which every episode can be "read" in several ways. "My Robot Baby," for instance, can be seen as a dry send-up of modern America's professional couples, who put off child-rearing until their 30s, then try to cram it into their busy professional schedules as if it were just another obligation. This particular couple's determination may seem a tad clueless, but we're reassured that at least it's gender-neutral; at first glance, both husband Roy and wife Marcia seem equally committed to having a child. (The child, in this case, is a football-sized mechanical egg with cheerful but dead eyes and sticklike arms.) But sure enough, when Roy's bosses dump extra work on his lap, he instinctively skedaddles and leaves his wife in charge?a twist that suggests that women may have come a long way, baby, but they'll never come far enough to be able to evade compulsory mommy duties. Equally chilling is the suggestion that the state could become so controlling and distrustful that it forces mothers and fathers to put off raising kids until they've tested themselves against a crude mechanical prototype of a baby.
"The Robot Fixer" moves even further away from didactic sci-fi, and probes recognizable emotion. The least overtly science fiction-y of all the stories, it follows heroine Bernice's near-fanatical quest to build a complete set of her comatose son's favorite childhood toys, a set of transforming robots that look suspiciously like Micronauts. (Any American child of the 70s will smile at the brand name.) This episode's power originates in Pak's restrained direction and Ho's correspondingly cool, even cold performance, which rejects stereotypically feminine sentiment and instead focuses on a more overtly masculine desire to achieve a goal no matter what the cost. Bernice is engaged in what a psychologist might call "sublimation"; she never truly connected with her son (whose intense, imaginative play with the toy robots in flashbacks suggests the improvisations of a future filmmaker). Now she's retroactively trying to correct the situation to ease her own guilt.
In some ways, "Machine Love" is the most daring of the four segments. Like other memorable recent sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters?including A.I. and The Return of the King?it presents a simple concept and unabashedly emotional characters without fashionable ironic distance. The main character is a humanoid robot named Archie (played by Pak himself, in an opaque yet moving performance that seems to absorb and then radiate the emotions of whichever characters happen to be in the room with him). Archie is a docile sweetheart who aims to please, programmed to learn from his coworkers, absorbing both their physical skills and their value systems. But he quickly grows to find them disappointing, even repulsive, and falls into a funk. Soon, he's a robot version of a beleaguered Franz Kafka hero, or the title character of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"?an emotionally closed-off thinking man, subjugated by others who have not a tenth of his self-awareness.
What first seems a standard parable about a machine that's more human than humans becomes darker and more suggestive when Archie begins spying on a beautiful female android in an office across the way. After hours, she is sexually harassed and even molested by boorish men, one of whom complains that his company should have ordered a robot with a better "rack." She's forced to endure this abuse because she is, by definition, inferior to her masters. Archie does not speak as he monitors this outrage, but his blank stare is charged with repressed fury; as we watch his face, we may be witnessing the dawning of a revolutionary's consciousness. The segment's secondary meaning emerges: "Machine Love" is about mankind's repulsive yet apparently timeless desire to hold other creatures as slaves. The sight of Archie standing upright and shirtless against a picture window at night?filled with longing, yet powerless to do anything to halt the evil occurring next door?is one of the most disturbing images in modern sci-fi cinema.
Like "The Robot Fixer," the final segment, "Clay," is less a typical sci-fi story than an existential drama in sci-fi drag. Shimono, whose magnificently haggard posture recalls Nick Nolte's grand wreck of a painter in New York Stories, is a depressed sculptor struggling toward a design for a memorial while flashing back to better days with help from his wife, Helen (a classy, intelligent performance by Eisa Davis). The catch: John's wife died a long time ago, and the character we think of as his wife is actually a digitized facsimile. (Davis is clearly at least a quarter-century younger than Shimono; in tender flashbacks to their youth, Shimono is portrayed by a younger actor.) John's son Tommy (Ron Domingo) pressures him to digitize his memories and personality, just as his wife once did. While John never really explains his resistance to this idea, his stubborn individuality hints at a reason. Deep down, this accomplished man is profoundly and understandably selfish. He feels that his experiences belong to him, not the world; indeed, his life (and his impending death) are the only things in John's life that truly belong to him. If he preserves the contents of his head for the future enjoyment of the living, those contents may become just another commodity?another trove of data to be stored and retrieved.
There are two intertwined issues at play here. One is the ability of digital technology to preserve swaths of raw experience (including, perhaps, a facsimile of one's life and personality), and whether our ability to replay that information is a miracle of modern science or more proof of humankind's essentially infantile, controlling nature. (Is there a difference between endlessly replaying a digital replica of a loved one and endlessly obsessing over a movie or pop song from youth?) The second issue is the contrast between the illusion of certainty offered by technology, and the reality of life itself, which is by definition uncertain. John wants to shape his life into something fixed and definite?a quest signified through repeated closeups of his hands shaping wet clay?but comes to realize that this goal will never be realized.
Here, as in the other segments, Pak refuses to tie up his meanings inside dummy-proof boxes. I've seen Robot Stories twice, and each viewing has prompted me to ponder different interpretations of each segment?especially the third and fourth. Before writing this review, I considered tamping down my enthusiasm, for fear that readers might be unable to get past Pak's obviously low budget and make the leap of faith required to connect with his ideas. But that leap of faith is what serious moviegoing is all about, so I'll go ahead and say it: Robot Stories is a great science fiction movie.
It's a dark, foreboding drama about two young brothers, Andrey (Vladimir Garin) and Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), whose life is upended by the unexpected return of their father (Konstantin Lavronenko, a thin, hard man with a falcon's steely gaze), who has been gone from their lives for years. The boys were never clear on why the old man stayed away; he might have been in prison or in the Army, or he might have simply been one of those fathers that went AWOL. To heal the wounds caused by absence, the boys go on a fishing vacation with their father that spirals into a battle between the family, the elements and each other. They are gnawed by hunger, weakened by exhaustion and lashed by driving rain. Their father is a Great Santini type, mocking them as weaklings and girls while saddling them with impossible physical tasks and taunting them to risk danger or be accused of having a yellow streak. The sons want only to please their father and earn his love; the father denies them affection and acceptance, or perhaps is just incapable of either. It is a story that cannot end happily.
Working from a screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko and Alexander Novototsky, Zvyagintsev seems to be channeling the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, or perhaps Charles Bukowski in short-story mode; the characterizations and situations are so spare-stripped down to the bone in an effort to charge the whole movie with "meaning"-that they nearly vanish onscreen. The actors are terrific-particularly Dobronravov, whose slack, open facial expressions suggest a baby Jean-Paul Belmondo-and the photography, by Mikhail Krichman, has the salt-etched loveliness of an N.C. Wyeth illustration. The director adores Soviet master Andrey Tarkovsky, and some of his camera moves seem influenced by Tarkovsky's movies, particularly Stalker and The Sacrifice. But these touches will mainly please film buffs. For most moviegoers, The Return will be unsatisfying-at once too much and not enough.
Like two other good Disney sports films, Remember the Titans and The Rookie, this one includes many young characters, yet ultimately insists on framing events through the eyes of a grownup hero: in this case, it's coach Herb Brooks, played by Kurt Russell with his usual combination of fierce concentration, emotional honest and zero sentiment. (A superb actor whose taste for genre pictures confounds intellectual critics, Russell may never get the praise he deserves; his old-school mix of intensity and humility recalls not the typical modern action film star, but old-school tough guys like Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Randolph Scott.)
The script is the usual misfits-whipped-into-shape narrative, but with a few intriguing twists?including Brooks' preference for Soviet-style collectivist thinking over American-style individualist showboating. (The Americans win by being more Soviet than the Soviets; Brooks' plays, scrawled on safety glass, suggest tactical maps etched in the sand by a general.) The opening montage of 1970s news clips puts the team's triumph in context of a decade of malaise, suggesting how this victory prefigured the fall of the U.S.S.R., the rise of Ronald Reagan and a new era of U.S. triumphalism.
The one flaw is the hockey sequences, which could have benefited from fewer closeups and more longshots to show how (and why) Brooks' strategies worked. Nevertheless, Miracle is a good story made into a good movie?a sports film for people who don't think they like sports films.