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Susan Granger's review of "BICENTENNIAL MAN" (Touchstone Pictures)
The last time director Chris Columbus teamed with Robin Willliams they came up with Mrs. Doubtfire but, if you're expecting this to be a slapstick kids' flick, think again. Adapted from a short story by Isaac Asimov, it chronicles the life of a NDR-114 robot who begins as a household appliance in 2005, created "to perform menial tasks: cooking, cleaning, making household repairs, playing with or supervising children." Dubbed Andrew by the youngest of the family's children (deep-dimpled Hallie Kate Eisenberg) who cannot pronounce "android," he soon begins to show creativity, curiosity, and compassion, confounding his manufacturer and launching a 200-year quest to discover his humanity. Nicholas Kazan's thoughtful screenplay cleverly explores the technology of artificial intelligence as it integrates with human behavior but, since it follows a family for several generations with only Andrew as a connective, it involves too many characters, several with literary-allusion names like Galatea and Portia. Plus, there's a constant awareness that underneath the plastic prosthesis, there's comical Robin Williams, desperately itching to emerge. Sam Neill scores as Andrew's original owner, as does Oliver Platt as a bio-tech designer who becomes Andrew's friend. It's interesting that, just like Woody in Toy Story 2, Andrew makes a choice between pristine immortality and the inexplicable vagaries of humanity but, unlike that magical fantasy, children under 10 will quickly be bored or depressed by the insipid depth of this 2-hour, 13-minute saga. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, Bicentennial Man powers up to a surprisingly serious, existential 7, as a poignant parable of what it means to be human.
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