“The Congress,” a bewildering live-action/animation hybrid from Israeli director Ari Folman, is a film with a lot on its mind — maybe too much. Adapted from “The Futurological Congress,” a 1971 science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, the film strips almost everything out of the original text except the bare necessities, trading its critique of the utopianism of youth culture for a jumbled meditation on the future of celebrity in a world of fickle and slippery identities.
Robin Wright stars as a version of herself, an actress who is hitting the glass ceiling. She is growing older, and her reputation as a difficult collaborator has hurt her standing in Hollywood. She lives in a bunker near the airport with her two children, one of whom is suffering from a rare disease that threatens deafness. Her only visitor is her agent (Harvey Keitel), who one day shows up at her door with a curious offer. A studio wants to meet with her about a secret project. When she arrives, she discovers the plan: as technology advances, there will be no more need for actors; instead, performers will be paid hefty sums to be scanned, so that their moving images can be reproduced in any ways deemed useful, forever and ever.
After some reluctance, Wright agrees. This all happens in the first hour. Then the film shifts gears. We’re now 20 years in the future, and the world we see is animated. We learn that in the intervening years Wright’s scanned image has become more popular than she ever was, starring in a franchise of grotesque action flicks. She arrives at something called The Futurological Congress, an event hosted by the studio to unveil their new technology, which allows anybody to switch identities — from a superhero to your favorite movie star in a matter of seconds — and they want Wright to sign up, essentially licensing her image not just to the movie studio but to the world.
From there, the film goes down a rabbit hole of convoluted twists and turns. A character named Dylan Truliner (voiced by Jon Hamm) arrives to steer Wright through the animated maze, and the narrative jumps years, maybe even centuries—it’s hard to tell. By this point, the story has veered wildly off track, and it feels like the viewer, not Wright, is stuck is a brightly colored and confusing world.
You have to give credit to Folman for even attempting such an ambitious project, or at least somehow convincing people to give him money to make it. But the problem with too much ambition is that the work of art often becomes simply about that and nothing else, scale and density for their own sake. Here, the ambition also deflates the critiques of the commodification of women’s bodies and the lust for immortality, which begin as brash and clever and, by the end, have transformed into a puddle of incoherence.
Toward the end, the action shifts back to live-action, and the viewer is reminded of the film they were once watching. But it’s too late. “The Congress,” by trying to cram so many ideas into its future-world, gets buried under the weight of them.
“The Congress” opens August 29 in Los Angeles and September 5 in New York City.
