Chalk this one up to a cross between Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Tron and Avatar. An actress named Robin Wright (played by Robin Wright) is deemed to be at the end of her career. She prefers to be at home taking care of her children anyway.
So she’s offered a technologically revolutionary opportunity to be scanned – both in a physical and emotional sense – into a computer file that would take her place in movies. The movie studio can put her in any movie it wants for two decades and she becomes free to live her life however she chooses.
It seems like it’s a contemporary enough story, starting with today’s motion capture cameras and progressing to the next logical step. Interestingly enough, it’s based – albeit loosely based – on the 1971 novel The Futurological Congress by the late great science fiction/fantasy writer Stanislaw Lem. If there were a fountain of youth and a utopia as the end result then why wouldn’t anyone choose the same?
Fast forward 20 years and Wright’s computerized character contract has come to a close. She attends the Futurological Congress that demonstrates how people can go even further: by becoming cartoon characters that can then transform into anything they want. Sounds great, yes?
Well, it’s not, especially if people want to transform themselves into you.
The Congress comes from writer/director Ari Folman and animator Yoni Goodman, the two geniuses behind the animated 2008 documentary Waltz with Bashir. Animation doesn’t typically lend itself well to that genre, or to futuristic sci-fi dramas such as this. A Scanner Darkly is perhaps the only prior exception to that rule that I can think of. This marks the second. After seeing it, you can’t imagine the story or the visualization of it as going any differently.
That being said, it’s kind of a bore. It has a dreadfully slow pace, making two hours feel like three or four. That seems weird to me, considering it is a very inventive idea with a most unusual visual style. I’m not saying that there needed to be unnecessary violence or car chases but I was honestly desperate for the end to finally come, sad as it was.
While The Congress offers a cinematic novelty, I tend to think of it as that weird and colourful confection that one gets seemingly out of nowhere as a middle-of-the-bag Halloween treat: it has far too much sugar, takes far too long to swallow and leaves a flavour on the tongue that does not make one want another sample. Perhaps this is one tale that was best left on the page.
Review
The Congress<br />Stars: 2.0<br />Starring Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Danny Huston, and Paul Giamatti<br />Written and directed by Ari Folman, based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem<br />Rated 14A for sexual content<br />Runtime: 123 minutes<br />Now playing at Metro Cinema
