Conceiving Ada
Director: Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Cast: Tilda Swinton, Francesca Faridany, Karen Black, Timothy Leary, J.D. Wolfe, John O'Keefe,
John Perry Barlow, Esther Mulligan. Screenplay: Lynn Hershman-Leeson.
Lynn Hershman-Leeson's film deliberately plays on the double entendre of its title, one which might have prospective renters
wildly misinterpreting what they are about to watch. The film explores the dual and sometimes duelling ways in which women
"conceive," centering around a brilliantly innovative computer scientist named Emmy (Francesca Faridany) who is carrying to
term both a pet academic project and an infant child. The film is far more interested in the technology narrative than in
the procreative one. This, at least, is a relief, since the scientific achievements of women are so often overlooked and
even prevented by the way society—and, just as often, movies—pigeon-hole them as essentially domestic creatures. The subject
of Emmy's research is Ada Byron King (Tilda Swinton), an actual historical figure whom many scholars believe made the crucial
mathematical breakthroughs in the nineteenth century that led to the invention and development of computers. (Ada's
discoveries are usually credited to her acquaintance and sometime colleague Charles Babbage, played in the film by John
O'Keefe.) Emmy, working at the very cusp of pre-21st century electronic engineering, has fine-tuned a new computer
technology that allows her to "enter" photographs that she scans into her machine, turning their flat visual planes into
resurrected three-dimensional spaces and allowing for direct, improbable dialogue between herself and the people captured
in the photographs.
"Improbable," unfortunately, becomes a key word and an unbearable weight on this project, which tries very hard to portray
women as radical learners, misunderstood geniuses, and recoverers of their own lost history. The disposition and ambition
of the project had me, as they say, at "hello," but somewhere along the way, the execution lost me. Emmy, who is so
zealously embroiled in her work that we have a hard time connecting with or liking her, has invented a technology that we
have a hard time taking very seriously—or, at least, as more than a conceit of a restlessly curious but curiously flat picture.
Though the film received attention in some egghead circles for being the first to generate computerized sets behind its
live-action actors, the sets themselves are obviously synthetic and occasionally flirt with the flat-out ugly. The excitement
of the film's technological breakthrough ultimately founders under our impatience with the coarse colors and the hard, pixillated
quality of the art direction. The longer Conceiving Ada goes on, the I felt that writer-director Hershman-Leeson
hadn't quite figured out what to do with the characters she created, at least in the modern setting. Ironically, that whole
plot eventually breaks down to the same sort of family-vs.-work firestorm—are Emmy's long hours in front of her computer
screen irradiating or harming her baby?—that have marked so much of the anti-feminist art to which Conceiving Ada
ostensibly means to provide a corrective. These questions and debates have value, but they are not the questions and debates
I was interested in engaging within this particular project, which constructs such a uniquely compelling environment but seems
all too conventional all too soon.
Unsurprisingly, the best reason to see Conceiving Ada is the performance of Swinton, one of the decade's
hardest-to-cast but most superlative actresses. Her controlled, utterly unsentimental work as Ada Byron King anchors the
Victorian half of the picture, pervading her sequences with a profound melancholy that derives both from the thunderous sense
of revolutionary possibility that surrounds the character and from the well-known fact that her career and her legacy will be
so powerfully thwarted. Swinton's crisp ability to play a heroine without asking for adulation makes us wish (well, made me
wish) that Hershman-Leeson had dispensed altogether with the modern-day frame story and Francesca Faridany's sullen performance
as Emmy, which gets almost twice the screen time that Swinton's turn does. Conceiving Ada deserves points for
calling our attention to a woman whose fusty, rule-bound society utterly failed to capitalize on her abilities; it also deserves
credit for being an adventurous, one-of-a-kind work of art that demonstrates the continued pliability and immanent renewability
of cinema itself, 100 years into its life. Still, I wish the filmmakers had conceived of a whole movie to wrap around its
fascinating heroine. Conceiving Ada is tantalizing to consider, but only half-pleasurable to actually watch, and it
fails at its ambassadorial task of prompting us to want to see more films like it. At least, for now. C