Pinocchio Was Here.

Asked whom he considered the most important French poet, Andre Gide famously replied, "Victor Hugo, alas." Asked who the most important American film director is today, I answer, "Steven Spielberg, alas." He is a great technician, has a terrific eye, and knows how to reach a large audience.

But Spielberg's shortcomings are also considerable. The reason so many of his films deal with children or extraterrestrials-or with sensational topics such as killer sharks, dinosaurs, and the Holocaust- is that these are ways of avoiding adults with their everyday existential problems, at which Spielberg is no good. And then there is his sentimentality, about which more anon.

Spielberg's latest, A.I. (for Artificial Intelligence), is by any standards a lesser, by mine a much lesser, performance. It is a project Stanley Kubrick had been piddling with and talking to Spielberg about, based on a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss. In Kubrick's hands, it was to have been a black dystopia; bequeathed to Spielberg, who wrote his own screenplay, it becomes an uneasy mix of trauma and treacle.

In a future where global warming has caused coastal cities (including New York) to be flooded, humanity has been decimated, and highly evolved humanoid robots serve numerous functions, from gardening to sexual pleasuring: everything except love, of which they are incapable. Now Prof. Hobby, the head of the Cybertronics lab, has come up with a robot boy, David, programmed to give undying love to his "parents." A Cybertronics employee, Henry Swinton, and his wife, Monica, whose mortally ill child has been cryogenically frozen and awaits a cure, are given David on a trial basis. After a number of contretemps, the wary Monica is won over and decides to make the adoption permanent. For some reason, David's love does not extend to Henry.

Everything is fine until the Swintons' natural son, Martin, is cured and returns home. Intense sibling rivalry ensues-Martin is odious, David angelic-and the Swintons, misled about some incidents, decide to jettison David. His grim "mother" drives him out into the woods and abandons the devastated kid in a scene guaranteed to melt the most robotic human heart. Here ends what is in essence the first movie. The second concerns David's wanderings with Teddy, his speaking and thinking supertoy teddy bear. They encounter a robot junkpile where less-damaged robots scavenge for replacement body parts, and where human robot hunters (threatened by robot proliferation) hunt down with robot dogs any stray mecha. (The robots are mechas, i.e., mechanicals; the humans, orgas, i.e., organics.) David meets up with Gigolo Joe, a cavorting, merry, adult mecha who services orga women better than an orga can. They strike up a friendship as David, yearning to become fully human and loved by Mommy, seeks the miracle-granting Blue Fairy he heard about in the fairy tales Monica read to him.

By now you must realize that this is a retelling of Pinocchio, with the trusty Teddy as Jiminy Cricket, and so on. Joe and David wander into a Flesh Fair, a hideous circus where doomed robots go heroically to their grisly deaths, as ferocious orga crowds watch and even brutally participate: The Roman arena and Nazi death camps are evoked. I spare you sundry adventures-including an encounter with Dr. Know, a hologram that answers questions in Robin Williams's voice-and skip to where we arrive in a semi-submerged New York City. Gigolo Joe has been dragged off to annihilation, and the despairing David dives off Radio City Music Hall into freezing waters and a 2,000-year sleep.

By now, in film No. 3, humans are extinct and the world is inhabited by elongated, benevolent, large but wispy creatures that help David and Teddy find the Blue Fairy, who looks like a primitive Madonna in an Italian village church and speaks with the voice of Meryl Streep. David's wish is sort of granted: By means of a lock of Monica's hair that Teddy has secreted, she is brought back alive for one day on David's birthday. He is a real boy now with a birthday cake and an adoring Mommy for a day. He even gets to sleep in her bed. We are not shown the aftermath, but surely the second and final loss of Mommy must be even more-and eternally-wrenching.

Among all the echoes and overtones, the Pinocchio parallel is particularly damaging: The rapscallion puppet had more unruly, idiosyncratic vitality than soppy David ever will. The talking Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel) is very cute, and rather steals the show from David. Henry, played by the dull Sam Robards, might as well be a second-rate robot; Frances O'Connor, as the neurotic Monica, looks polished and manicured enough for a first-class robot, but is a very poor mother. As Joe, Jude Law, with a now blond, now black crest of a hairdo and what looks like polyurethane cheeks, has some amusing lines, but does not really fit into the story.

Perhaps the best scene comes early. It has Prof. Hobby (William Hurt) demonstrating to a group of scientific onlookers how a robot works (but don't they know that already?). He pushes the upper half of an attractive woman's face up like the visor on a helmet, revealing the inner mechanism, then pushes it down again, whereupon she calmly refreshes her makeup. But she, like Joe, seems metallic and hard- scarcely the kind of bed partner one would wish for.

Haley Joel Osment (David) is an accomplished actor, and with a little help from his excellent makeup, conveys the convergence of creature and machine with moving conviction. But he must stop playing weird, preternatural beings, lest he become typecast, if not indeed deprived of his boyhood.

The various designers, and the fine cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, conjure up hauntingly beautiful or houndingly scary images, but the clash of the Kubrick imp and the Spielberg sentimentalist undermines whatever cohesion the movie might have. Artificial intelligence veers into genuine silliness.

--If there is one kind of film we do not need, it is that written, directed, and starred in by a pair of actors, with their friends for supporting cast. What could be more inbred-with all that term implies? Alan Cumming, the Scottish actor best known as the emcee in Broadway's Cabaret, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who briefly played Sally opposite him, concocted this self-indulgent home movie, The Anniversary Party, which purports to reveal intimate Hollywood revels-but delivers only the kind that by now any college kid could recite by heart.

Cumming plays a British novelist about to direct his first movie and cozying up to his star (the simpering Gwyneth Paltrow); Leigh is his jealous American wife, whose career, like their rocky marriage, may be on the skids. Their sixth-anniversary party assembles all kinds of dizzy film-biz types and their spouses, as well as some hated neighbors and a couple of unappealing dogs. There are fights, incipient infidelities, naked divings into the pool, a near death, and a flaunted abortion that may not actually have been one. Also some sage, sisterly exchanges between women friends. No cliche is left unturned in dialogue (mostly improvised) and action (mostly hand-me-down).

Kevin Kline and his real-life spouse (Phoebe Cates) and children, not to mention Parker Posey, Jennifer Beals, John C. Reilly, John Benjamin Hickey, among others, are entrapped in this mess. Cumming, supposedly a great ladies' man here, is one of the unsightliest and least masculine actors known to me, painful to watch; Leigh is much better, but you cannot believe them as a married couple. But then, there's not much else you can believe either.