The Congress- What The Film?

Ian Burt

About ten years ago I wrote a story set in the near future about a Hollywood agent that represented not living actors but the estates of dead ones, selling the right to use their digital recreation in new films. His main client? Dale Evans, Roy Rogers' wife.

I was delighted to discover that this was the conceit behind the sci-fi film The Congress, in which the wooden Harvey Keitel (how does he get so many good roles when the man can't act?), as the agent of real-life actress Robin Wright of Princess Bride and Forrest Gump fame, is offered a bundle of money for the rights to her digital image in perpetuity. At the thirty-minute mark, I understood what was going on and was looking forward to seeing how it played out.

Then all hell broke loose. Jumping 20 years into the future, the film, based on a story by Stanislaw Lem, turned into a cartoon. Literally. In this cartoon universe, people could snort a pharmaceutical that allowed them to create their own reality. Apparently, most people's reality looks a lot like the introduction to Monty Python's Traveling Circus with bits of R. Crumb, Walt Disney and Georgia O'Keeffe thrown in. Through this acid-trip of a film I desperately clung to the thread of a plot in which Wright attempts to reconnect with her son. I think (not sure) that this happened in the end.

This was no low-budget effort. The cast alone (which also included Paul Giamatti and Jon Hamm) must have set them back a few bucks, and the hour of animation, although far short of Pixar quality, didn't come cheap.

Critics were sharply divided on this film. The ones that favored it seemed to be able to follow the plot much better than I; I found many WTF moments in the last half of the film. Wright struggled mightily to bring humanity to her role, but the animation overwhelmed the acting. When a flower is growing out of a character's forehead it's easy to lose track of her dialogue.

This is a film with wild ambition but modest accomplishment. Don't expect Roger Rabbit. If you've ever tripped out on mescaline while attending Burning Man, you might grok this movie.

I knew there was something missing from my bucket list.