There are two sides to Robin Williams.  One is the wacky comedian that America fell in love with on Mork & Mindy, and the other is an Oscar-winning actor.  You can tell the two of them apart by Williams’ facial hair – clean-shaven means he’s in out-of-control mode (Good Morning, Vietnam), while a full beard indicates a more serious, restrained Robin (Good Will Hunting).  But how do you tell which side you’re going to get when his face is obscured by a mask?

Although Williams is beardless under his costume in Bicentennial Man, he shows the control and self-discipline of his tranquil alter-ego.  I guess it goes to prove that looks can be deceiving.  But that’s not the only thing surprising about this film.  Disney seems to be selling it as a holiday film for children, but it’s actually a pretty serious drama (containing a handful of laughs) with a running time of well over two hours.  And here’s another shocker – it’s rather good.

Based on a short story of the same name by science-fiction guru Isaac Asimov (he later fleshed it out into a novel called "The Positronic Man" with collaborator Robert Silverberg) and adapted for the screen by Nicholas Kazan (Fallen), Bicentennial Man is basically a futuristic version of Pinocchio.  Williams (Jakob the Liar) stars as a robot servant that dreams of becoming a human being.  As the title implies, the film takes place over a two-hundred-year period, which means that Williams’ droid watches generations of his human “family” succumb to death while he never ages.

After showing a nifty robot assembly line during the opening credits, the film opens “sometime in the future.”  We don’t know how far, but we do see that cars can talk and that sweaters with patches on the elbow are back in style again (later on, we find out that its 2005, so get your patches ready).  A well-to-do clockmaker named Martin (Sam Neill, The Horse Whisperer) has just purchased an NDR-114 robot for his family.  The machine is supposed to be responsible for housekeeping and food preparation, but instead shows un-robotic traits like creativity and a desire to learn.  He is called Andrew and the Martins treat him like a member of the family, except for making him live in the basement. 

Andrew hits it off with the Martins’ youngest daughter (Hallie Kate Eisenberg from the Pepsi commercials), who he calls Little Miss.  Before you know it, the years have flown by and Little Miss has become Old Wrinkled Miss (Embeth Davidtz, Mansfield Park).  But prior to kicking the bucket, Little Miss introduces Andrew to her gaunt granddaughter Portia (also Davidtz), who is the spitting image of her willowy grandmother.  Andrew and Portia also have a close relationship, but she’s engaged to marry a guy that looks like Jay Leno’s great-great-great grandson (Jay Johnston, Mr. Show).

Aside from his depressing family life, Andrew runs into a female android (doesn’t the word “android” imply a lack of sexuality?) that works for an NDR-114 specialist named Rupert Burns (Oliver Platt, Lake Placid).  Andrew expresses his desire to become more human, and he and Burns create revolutionary technology to begin the transformation.  Burns starts by slapping some flesh-colored Flubber onto Andrew, and then adds a central nervous system and so on and so on.  But no matter what type of upgrades he receives, Andrew is still only recognized as a simple machine.

One of the greatest features of the film is the realistic aging of its characters.  The other is the unbelievable fact that Bicentennial Man received a “PG” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.  It has a couple of frank discussions about sex, as well as around a dozen bad words (including, alphabetically, “ass,” “bitch,” two different versions of “goddamn,” and about a half-dozed occurrences of “shit”).  There’s even a scene where Andrew squeezes out a post-coital fart after his first lay.  This rating seems particularly wrong following the MPAA’s “R” rating for Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.  They both had very similar content, but since Deuce’s target audience was drunk, date-raping frat-boys, it was slapped with the “R.”  Bicentennial Man is being pushed on kids, and ended up with the “PG.”  Go figure.

2:15 - for language and some sexual content