Movie Synopsis: An aging actress (Robin Wright, playing a version of
herself) decides to take her final job: preserving her digital likeness for a
future Hollywood. In return, she receives healthy compensation so she can care for her ailing son while her digitized
character will stay forever young. Twenty years later, under the creative
vision of the studio's head animator, Wright's digital double rises to immortal
stardom. With her contract expiring, she is invited to take part in "The
Congress" convention as she makes her comeback straight into the world of
future fantasy cinema.
If there is any truth to the phrase, “Misery loves company,” then
this is a movie best watched with friends. The Congress is an unfocused attempt
to address what transpires on a personal level for those engaged in being movie
celebrities as they try to create art AND THEN parlay that into a meditation on
identity. The result winds up being the cinematic equivalent of diarrhea; you
want to analyze it but what you’ve got it so muddied there’s no hope of making
clear sense of it. You’re going to try anyway, though, since you’ve invested two
hours in this movie having been suckered in by the false promise of the first
45 minutes. During that time, the movie does give us an interesting set-up, but
as soon as we’re cast 20 years into the future (allegedly; the movie is quite
clear that where we are in time is not clear) the movie swerves wildly into
Being John Malcovich-Meets-Pink Floyd’s The Wall-Meets-Inception-Meets-The
Matrix territory. (This abrupt swerve in the movie is barely hinted at in the
movie’s trailer, probably for a good reason.) Beyond the 45 minute mark, the
movie is mostly animated which would have been fine except that the movie begins
to focus on how bizarre it’s trying to be without doing much to advance the
plot. Like so many movies, we’re teased by some very deep and intriguing
questions but are not given any input on what the writer or director think
about those questions, leading to a superficial resolution for our lead
character. Moreover, at the movie’s end there is a plot hole too large to
ignore: What happened to the world over the course of 20 years Robin is “on
vacation” is not explained in the least, a detail that could have been used to provide us with some
context for the protagonist’s inner conflicts. While many artsy-fartsy viewers
will find this movie delightfully eccentric, being eccentric should not be
confused with being clever. Being clever requires knowing exactly what you’re
doing. [Interesting fact: The movie was made on a budget of about $11 million
and grossed less than a million at the box office. But maybe that was meant to
be given that Robin Wright plays a version of herself that makes bad decisions.
In real life, she is one of the movie’s producers.]
