“The Congress” doesn’t fully live up to its lofty ambitions, but it does attempt something most filmmakers wouldn’t even dream of — a dystopian blend of live-action and animation that acidly comments on some of Hollywood’s touchiest issues before drifting off into an existential fog.
The issues: Tinseltown’s limited use for talented actresses of a certain age and the trend of deploying digital likenesses (for now only dead actors).
This bold film by Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”) imagines a near future when a famous actress named “Robin Wright” (played by the real Robin Wright) is no longer employable in movies because she’s “temperamental,” “unreliable” and, mostly, on the wrong side of 40. (This film was ironically made before 48-year-old Wright’s career renaissance in “House of Cards”).
The CEO of the amusingly named Miramount studios (a wonderfully oily Danny Huston) wants to license the digital likeness of the star of “The Princess Bride” — providing he can star “her” in the kind of movies that the “real” Robin spurns.
Wright has a seriously ill young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) with big medical expenses, so she agrees to be scanned as part of a 20-year deal with Miramount.
Two decades later, the film company wants the 60-something Wright to re-up and sign off on the latest technology — mind-altering drugs that allow users to actually become any cinematic icon.
As if this wasn’t trippy enough, the film now switches from live-action to animation. At the titular congress hosted at a massive resort, the reluctant Robin meets the animator who heads Miramount’s “Robin Wright Department” (voiced by Jon Hamm).
The two of them get caught up in a rebellion at the congress, and after another two-decade jump taking Robin in and out of live-action and animation, she attempts to locate her now-grown son.
Things bog down in this section, taken at least partly from a 1971 novel by Stanislaw Lem, as the film drifts away from the biting showbiz satire at the beginning.
But the brightly colored, old-school animation style — somewhere between surrealistic 1930s Betty Boop cartoons and the psychedelic stylings of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” feature — dazzles the eye even when the script’s meanderings threaten to numb the mind. A joint or two probably wouldn’t hurt.