tek's rating: ½

The Congress (not rated)
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streaming sites: Amazon; Hulu; Vudu

This is very loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem's 1971 novel "The Futurological Congress", which I haven't read. The movie cam out in 2013, but I didn't see it until 2021. Robin Wright plays a fictionalized version of herself at age 44. Her career has been in very bad shape for many years now, and she gets an offer from Miramount Studios to have herself digitally scanned so they can use computers to put her in movies, as her younger self, but she won't be allowed to act ever again in reality. At first she refuses, but her agent, Al (Harvey Keitel) eventually talks her into it. Also I think she needs the money to help care for her (fictional) son, Aaron, who is losing both his hearing and his vision. (Aaron's doctor is played by Paul Giamatti. Robin also has a daughter named Sarah, who isn't as important to the story as Aaron.)

After Robin is scanned, the movie skips forward 20 years. Robin is going to attend a "Futurist Congress" where everyone and everything is animated. At least part of the time I think Robin is hallucinating, but I have no idea how much of what she experiences is real. Some people attack the Congress, though their motives aren't quite clear to me. (I guess they're opposed to a new drug Miramount is producing that allows people to not only become animated, but to do so in the guise of anyone they want to.) Then Robin gets cryogenically frozen for 20 years. She reconnects with a man named Dylan (voiced by Jon Hamm), whom she had met during the attack. He eventually helps her return to the real world, where she wants to search for Aaron.

That's all I want to say about the plot, but I will say that Wikipedia mentions some things that I have no recollection of seeing when I watched the DVD. Anyway... the whole thing is certainly interesting in concept, but I couldn't get as into it as I hoped I might. Partly because it was all so confusing, and perhaps partly because I felt that the obvious weirdness and chaos of the animated world wasn't adequately explored. I probably would have really liked a movie that was more about seeing that world in depth, whereas in this movie it seemed to be just a backdrop to Robin's journey. Which is fine, because that's the story that's being told. Anyway, I'm glad to have seen the movie, even if I found it a bit disappointing.


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