Congressional Discord

The two posters you see to either side are for the same movie. That alone should tell you a lot about the confused mess that is The Congress. A foreign film with both French and Israeli origins, The Congress was made in 2013, but is only just seeing distribution in the U.S. thanks to a deal with the Alamo Drafthouse's "original programming" branch, Drafthouse Films.

It's incredibly hard to describe what The Congress is about, in large part because the face it presents at first does not reflect the movie it ends up being. Here's the "Being John Malkovich"-like pitch that sold me on wanting to see it in the first place:

Actress Robin Wright, of The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump fame, is at a career crossroads. She has passed over enough acting jobs during the prime years of her career to jeopardize her "brand," and she is now faced with only one option. Her studio is beginning to branch out into an exciting new area, digitizing performers and using their computer avatars in perpetuity to make new films. Wright is offered the money needed to help her son's medical condition, in exchange for giving up acting and allowing her digital avatar to carry on making movies in her stead -- movies Wright herself was too picky to agree to in her prime.

I'm sure that sounds plenty odd to you, but here comes the really odd part: that describes only the first 40 minutes of the film. The second act picks up 20 years in the future, when Wright's studio wants to extend her contract for all sorts of new technology, and she agrees to enter an "animation only environment" to finalize negotiations. The remainder of the film then becomes animated, and is a hallucinogenic screed against the perils of dehumanizing technology.

This second half of the movie is what completely lost me. To be clear, the animation is absolutely beautiful. An imaginative and stylized world is lovingly rendered, a bizarre hybrid of old black-and-white Warner Brothers cartoons and Japanese anime. But aside from the tenuous thread of "out of control technology," this section of the film has absolutely nothing to do with the first part. Where the live action intro relies on Wright's reputation as a choosy and "difficult" actress, leveraging it into a quirky narrative, this animated film could easily be about anyone. The result is a very pretty, yet incoherent, jumble.

But Robin Wright, playing "herself," gives it her all. It's a strong and deeply emotional performance, both in the live action and animated chunks of the film. The strangeness of the film makes it awfully hard for the audience to care, but there's never any doubt that she cares very much. Similarly committed performances come from Jon Hamm as the voice of Wright's "character animator" in the animated section, and Paul Giamatti as a doctor in the live action section (himself no stranger to actors playing "themselves" for the sake of a gimmick).

Still, the performances -- no matter how good -- can't save the confusion of two incompatible films being forcibly stitched together. If you're a fan of painstaking animation, there might be some compelling visuals in this for you. Otherwise, I really can't recommend the film for anyone. I give it a D-.