Having meticulously replicated the Wright-brothers' flying machines, real actress Robin Wright's fictitious son of The Congress brags, "I build in the world of jet planes and space ships." He is a living master in a dying field. Less a master of her own skill-set due to the "lousy choices" her agent incessantly references, the Robin Wright of The Congress is also in a dying field: acting. In the first of two scenes in which Wright's agent Al addresses her with a monologue -the camera transfixed as her face reacts (like in Birth's timeless long take or the newly minted classic shot of Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave), Wright's eyes silently expel tears as Al (a world-weary Harvey Keitel) says that the studio has only one more last chance to offer. This last chance is "scanning": the studio systems assumption that all actors are driven by money rather than artistry.
Seeing actors as fickle variables to be coddled, scanning will be the end of their "skipping out on PR, the end of begging for forgiveness... that will all be gone." An actor's likeness and expressions would be "scanned"; a contract would be drafted clarifying any instances in which the likeness cannot appear (i.e. in Nazi movies or pornography), and the actor would be paid upon his or her contractual vow to never act again. The studio explains to Robin Wright how they wanted her to appear like the breathing embodiment of Grace Kelly on the artwork for The Princess Bride. With scanning, the movie could have simply starred Grace Kelly's actual likeness. Wright's daughter asks, "what happens to the actors?" Obsolete: they would cease to be, only malleable characters for the studio to utilize at its discretion would remain. The gift of choice afforded them in selecting and denying roles would be taken away. Witnessing a computer-generated performance by an actress' scanned likeness, Wright is disgusted that no one even asked her if she wanted to be portrayed in that way, in that movie. Her agent's response is, "When did they ask you?"
Robin Wright wants no part of "scanning". But her son's eroding health injects a financial component into her decision-making. Aaron, her inquisitive boy who makes planes, flies kites over a fence protecting airport landing strips, fantasizes about the sky, and poetically describes his kite's red meeting a plane's black in the sky's white suffers from a neurological disorder that is gradually robbing him of his hearing and sight. At a medical appointment, incorrectly parroting back words his doctor (Paul Giamatti) speaks to him in an earpiece, Aaron sits vulnerable and small -watching his mother and neurologist through a glass pane. The camera acting as his eyes, it watches Giamatti's and Wright's mouths in tight close-up as they discuss his condition. Despondent reading lips, Aaron's gaze pauses for a moment on the fish in a tank between his mother's and doctor's faces as he imagines the sounds of the sky's winds.
Describing Aaron's disorder, his neurologist hails him as decades ahead of his time. As darkness progressively invades his sight, his mind actually works harder than most: interpretively filling in visual blanks left by his condition with what he knows to be going on. One day all men's minds will work this way. People will be given "story data" and populate it with images from their imaginations. This is the future of movies. Perhaps one's mom will be cast as the lead in one's own mind, perhaps one will even cast Robin Wright. The phasing out of actors is just the beginning of film itself being rendered obsolete. In the words the studio eventually articulates to Wright years after she submits to being scanned, "Movies are old news, a remnant of the last millennium. We cracked the formula for free choice, you can be what you want. We are in the era of free choice. " Man not only wants to "see" what he wants to see but "be" what he wants to be, consumer culture escalated beyond consuming a film, a story, a plot to consuming an actor, a character, a person and becoming who he or she is.
Ari Folman's The Congress is some kind of masterwork that spans the worlds of light-saturated cinematography and hallucinogenic animation. Max Richter's beautiful musical score (evoking the likes of Take Shelter's and Inception's) and Robin Wright's self-aware tour-de-force performance unify the diverse scene-scapes of its distinctive worlds. Caught up in the magnificence of its own animated and emotional grandeur, The Congress only briefly deviates from its course, focus muddled, before its quick and glorious return to form. This is a film that is as much a rumination on dreams bringing about a reality-stripping progress that replaces truths with the dreams that obscured them as it is the journey to get back to whats real and then questioning, "Maybe it's better over there dreaming."
Inception director Christopher Nolan recently made waves declaring that he refuses to shoot films digitally. He will only shoot on physical film. With all the technological advances made in the movie industry, why stay behind? Because Nolan is building flying machines "in the world of jet planes and space ships".
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