Ruse of the Machines

PLAYING DETECTIVE Del Spooner in I, Robot, Will Smith spraypaints the circuitry in his injured prosthetic arm a surprising light-brown color to match his face. The action is surprising since it is the film's only outright reference to the character's ethnicity; it's also startling because the move brought back that kindergarten moment when you realized that the Crayolas labeled "Flesh" never came any shade of brown. That memory recurs because most of I, Robot takes place in a childish context. That's why Will Smith can casually color himself cocoa: This movie's innocuous racial allegory leaves all manner of personal detail unspoken—and nonthreatening.

Race isn't unimportant to the story of I, Robot. Smith's casting in this adaptation of the Isaac Asimov book (what Hollywood calls "non-traditional casting") draws attention to the problems of racial profiling, police brutality and then, unhelpfully, flips them. Det. Spooner hates robots the way white cops in movies customarily hate urban dwellers—an irrational prejudice that is always excused by the purposefulness of the cop's ornery suspicion. So even here it turns out that Spooner is the first person to realize that robots (who in the film's futuristic setting have become a secondary social class performing all menial and servile duties) pose a potential danger to the human populace of Chicago in 2035. Spooner/Smith isn't patrolling an update of Metropolis, but Ghettopolis. The bigotry that makes him skeptical and mean also makes him the right man to head off the upcoming revolution in which robots attempt a take-over.

It's a pretend-clever idea to have a black performer act out police prejudice. I, Robot is predicated on the kind of genre silliness I would ordinarily avoid, but Will Smith's first politically suggestive film is a spectacle too strange to pass by. His glib, smiley presence is as kid-friendly as his soft-soap rap style. Mr. Crayola has specialized in his own facetious Hollywood genre. I, Robot could even be a sequel to the Men in Black novelties and the Wild Wild West travesty, given the way it posits the future fantastic through a surfeit of cartoonish f/x and cheeky grins. Will Smith exists so that multicultural audiences can feel gregarious—clued in to what's fly—yet need not take anything too seriously.

When robot-inventor Dr. Lanning (James Cromwell) is killed by one of his own creations, Spooner hunts down the rogue machine and discovers it's been given extenuating traits—it can feel emotion; it can dream. And it has a name, Sonny. Spooner's anger is tested once he gets to know the silvery white-faced Sonny. "Perhaps you don't like their kind," suggests Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), the billionaire chairman of U.S. Robotics, the company that built Sonny and plans to install robots in every social and domestic capacity. Spooner's sympathy for Sonny's kind completes the plot's racial allegory; the bitter cop changes his tack when he learns compassion and helps liberate a new, misunderstood species. Instead of illuminating the social problem of police bias, the film minimizes it. Smith's presence itself soothes real-life anxiety about hostile cops and racist authority because in this fantasy, the only cop with a problem is himself black. And Spooner's ethnicity is merely an applique—as superficial and toy-like as the nostalgic pop that he plugs into for emotional connection via his old-fashioned boombox (Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," Fontella Bass' "Rescue Me").

The makers of I, Robot don't have to specify Will Smith's ethnicity because, as that wired-up fake arm suggests, he really is a robot (a crayon, a Hollywood tool). His body is as absurdly pumped up as late-era Sylvester Stallone's, and when he walks, he doesn't exactly swagger, but slides—feet first rather than ballsy. Smith's style is consistent with his usual flip racial deprecations. In Bad Boys, he announced his presence with Martin Lawrence pleading, "Don't worry, we're Negroes!" Here, he tells an affectionate kitten, "You're a cat, I'm black. I'm not going to be hurt again." These weak jests ease the mainstream audience's racial anxiety. Smith's insincerity makes I, Robot more commercial, but it also undermines the truth of both Spooner and Sonny's paranoia, which should be the essence of futuristic sci-fi. Smith's saccharine persona (he even visits a coddling grandma who bakes him sweet potato pie) nullifies the film's one possibly evocative moment.

On a mission while driving his Super Lexus, Spooner gets squeezed between two gigantic rigs, each filled with mercenary robots triggered to kill. Coming at him row by row, the endless phalanx of gleaming adversaries suggests a relentless high-tech lynch mob. Modeled after the lunatic Chunnel scene in Mission Impossible, this is a true inexorable nightmare vision. Its precise meaning is vague, because it probably comes out of Smith's unconscious, but during a lull in the death chase, his witticism places it exactly: "Alright, I'm gonna get some rest and I'll deal with y'all tomorrow"—a classic African-American survivor's retort, known to middle-class strivers everywhere, and as old as the blues.

With a better director than the f/x-mad Alex Proyas and a more rigorous screenwriter than Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), this scene would have been the heart of I, Robot: Spooner chased by his political dopplegangers, attacked by the manifestation of his own fears. It's one thing for a black actor to finally ascend to prominence and power in Hollywood, but Smith doesn't know how to utilize his eclat. This is proven by I, Robot's failure to practice genre codes for their fullest effect. Rather than invest Asimov's story with new personal meaning, or let Spooner/Smith express the pressure of working for society's elite—or remembering something about Chicago's history of class and race disparities (2035 isn't that far away)—the filmmaking team resorts to uninspired imitation. You can itemize the steals from A.I. (Sonny asking, "What am I?"); Minority Report (the intercutting of watery blue and white imagery); 2001: A Space Odyssey (a super computer named VIKI for Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence that turns proprietary); and others from Total Recall to Mission to Mars.

Sad thing is, the filmmakers don't expect audiences to have gained insight from those superior films. The most egregious steal has to be from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where a robot built in the image of the film's heroine winks. Spooner and Sonny exchange this intimacy but without Lang's expressionist audacity. Perpetuating Hollywood's hideous black and white buddy-movie formula mitigates the menacing skepticism of Lang's fantastic thrillers, failing to credibly account for the future and the racial hypocrisy we bequeath to it. That chase scene could have been one of the great paranoid sequences in film history—worthy of Lang—but Smith's happy-darky act gets in the way. As a producer-star, he needs some good moviemaking advice, like: Stop winking.

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD We've all inherited Brando's example of unfettered, still-complicated masculinity, but only Colin Farrell with his dark brows, quick smile and sly ease calls up the great man's ghost. He doesn't affect sensuality; he seems in touch with his natural sexual sensitivity. This should be an asset to Farrell's performance in A Home at the End of the World, where he plays Bobby, a 60s Cleveland youth accidentally responsible for the death of the older brother he adored—The Fugitive Kind, indeed. Bobby spends the rest of his life in a hippie daze. Even throughout AIDS- era ravages, when he moves to New York and trades his mullet for a superboyish crewcut, he lives by his brother's sex and dope mantra: "It's love man, it's just love."

It's also crap. A Home is another Michael Cunningham adaptation that, like The Hours, parallels gay political oppression with feminist frustration, mixing literary pretense with soapsuds. Farrell's Bobby represents a puzzling, ultimately unattainable masculine ideal that taunts his boyfriend friend Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) and the redhead big-city hat-maker Clare (Robin Wright Penn). Cunningham's queer-era sentimentality disgraces the revolution in human sexuality that artists like Brando pioneered (especially in his greatest 60s role as the sexually frustrated Army officer in John Huston's film of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye).

Director Michael Mayer tries matching blatancy with tastefulness, but the stretch for profundity is laughable. When Bobby and Jonathan confront their parents' tombstones and their own destinies, Bobby explains, "The dead are just people, too. People who want what we want." It only proves Cunningham hasn't heard the Smiths' "Cemetry Gates." o