The Android Affair

Harley Jane Kozak plays a young surgeon named "Karen Garrett" who is improving her skills by practicing on androids. Her boss, "Dr. Winston" (Ossie Davis) tells her that in order to become a better surgeon she needs to be able to improve her personal relationships with her patients. So, when she is given a difficult heart procedure to perform on a certain android named "William" (Griffin Dunne), she agrees to take him out of the laboratory to see the outside world. When she does things begin to get complicated. Anyway, rather than spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it I won't divulge the rest of the story. I would, however, like to go over some of the good and bad things in this film. First, I didn't care for Griffin Dunne's role as he was simply too juvenile in a number of scenes. Likewise, Saul Rubinek (as the android "Fiedler") looked completely ridiculous with his long hair constantly getting in the way. In many ways he reminded me of the musician, "Tiny Tim" who used to sing on the show "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In". Since I could never take Tiny Tim seriously it was very difficult to take Saul Rubinek's performance seriously either. But that's probably just me. Along those same lines, I thought Natalie Radford (as "Rachel Tyler") appeared to just be going through the motions and was totally dull and uninspired. That said, about the only good thing about this movie was the performance of Harley Jane Kozak who managed to breathe a little life into this rather lifeless film. Unfortunately, it just wasn't enough.

The possibility of intimate relations between android and human has been referred to in several motion pictures, notably BLADERUNNER, directed by Ridley Scott, and that is the subject of this poorly composed work, produced for cable television, written by its director Richard Kletter and science fiction author Isaac Asimov, from a short film of Kletter's: "Teach 109". At the Institute For Surgical Research androids are subjects for empirical surgery, as the robotic creatures, formulated with the precise likeness of man but without a soul or an ability to feel pain, are able to express their exact internal physical condition throughout invasive procedures. Harley Jane Kozak portrays Dr. Karen Garrett, a newly fledged surgeon who has been selected by the head of the Institute to perfect a method for correcting a particularly severe cardiac condition, exploiting androids as experimentees. The individual chosen for her surgical task is of an advanced design of replicant played by Griffin Dunne, called Teach, and a burgeoning relationship between it and the doctor occupies the remainder of the romantic comedy. Teach has unexplainedly an eloquently endowed and rebellious personality and the script describes how, when attempting to maintain control of her wayward medical subject, Karen falls in love with it. Upon its persistent request, she smuggles Teach out from the Institute to enable it to learn of the real world and to interrelate with humans, and the film's problems become overwhelming at that point. A most obvious difficulty is in acceptance of Karen's abrupt metamorphosis from a dedicated and ambitious surgeon into a rather giddy and love-struck amorosa of an artificial being. Dunne and Kozak are noted for performing in roles emphasizing their talents for the expression of wry humour; Dunne responds well to strong direction (not available here) whereas Kozak has too limited an acting range to do much with this thinly written piece. A highly episodic scenario offers copious holes: the "outside world" into which the oddly matched lovers escape in this story set in the future has a remarkable similarity to contemporary Toronto, the streets of which are cleansed of human life whenever the storyline requires gunfire or other excessive activity; the casting is quaint with seemingly significant characters vanishing from the plot; there is precious little character development in lieu of inclusion of "twists" that don't and plot surprises that employ a telegraph; poor Kozak is given perhaps the most ludicrous line when she avows to the android: "You are the love of my life" - not edited properly, so that we are privy to the beginning of her afterlaugh - typical of this slipslop production.

This is a low budget movie so I will forgive some things to it. It had a good plot and the acting was decent. And what do you think, will humans and machines be able to have relationships in the future?

There are extremely few movie (or TV) versions of Asimov stories. He hated Hollywood, knowing perfectly well that they would water down his stories to complete commercial blandness. He said in an interview once that Hollywood science fiction tends to be 50 years behind the literature. Very true.

The Android Affair, however, is not that bad. It's not a masterpiece, but neither is it complete drek. While not terribly engaging or exciting, it is overall well-produced and well-acted, and the story is coherent, logical and has a good and satisfying ending (which is a rarity). It is of course a fairly low-budget movie that looks like it's produced for television, but it makes its low budget go a long way. Nothing looks awfully artificial or bad; the style is well maintained throughout, and the story itself is not bad at all. So, considering the dearth of Asimov adaptations out there, this one is well worth seeking out for Asimov fans.

6 out of 10.