Film #48 - Robot and Frank

I don’t know who Susan Sarandon’s agent is these days but, frankly, he or she could do with a raise. For an industry that famously gives short shrift to older actresses this is the second small-scale, solid film I’ve seen her shine in this year (after Jeff, Who Lives At Home which I actually saw at TIFF last year).

Not that Sarandon is the centrepiece of this debut scifi-comedy from director Jake Schreier, she is more the icing on the already very sweet cake.

Robot and Frank is set in the “near” future, where robots have begun to take over many of the menial (and less menial) roles once performed by human. The curmudgeonly Frank (played by the coincidentally named Frank Langella) is making the worst of his retirement and showing alarming signs of developing severe dementia. His frazzled, jaded son Hunter (James Marsden), frustrated with weekly ten hour journeys to ensure Frank stays alive decides to solve the problem by buying Frank a robotic android in the Honda Asimo style whose programming is to prolongate Frank’s independence through diet, exercise and maintaining mental acuity.

You'll be glad to know they still have
trees in the near-future.

An old-school thinker, Frank is far from impressed by Robot (rather distractingly voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) impinging on his scattered lifestyle until he discovers that it would be the perfect accomplice in his old racket of cat burglary. As the object of Frank’s affection Jennifer’s (Susan Sarandon) job comes under fire as hipster yuppy Jake (Jeremy Strong) buys out the library she works and seeks to turn it into a merely-ironic celebration of the printed word, Frank hatches plans for vengeance and incorporates Robot into his schemes. Robot, seeing the dramatic improvement in Frank’s health statistics as he plans his newest burglary, feels programmed to comply. From there an unlikely friendship between the two blooms.

As high-concept as Robot and Frank may sound, what works about it is that it keeps things on a very low-key level. The film is careful to position the plot only a few years in our future (Frank’s adult children are called Hunter and Madison after all) which lets it get away with featuring only mild changes from the present day and keeps the robots peppered through the script at a relatively low-tech level.

If you want me to think he's demented, I'm not sure telling me
he has a crush on Susan Sarandon is the best way to achieve it

Similarly the plot doesn’t have grand ambitions for where it is going with the concepts, holding to more of a character study of Frank himself and his evolving mirror, Robot. Frank isn’t planning to jack a casino, merely enact petty revenges on the people making Jennifer’s life difficult. For a first time feature director to keep his vision so containable is a great idea as it has allowed Schreier to focus much more on key elements rather than getting lost in the effects.

With Langella and Sarandon in the leads, it almost goes without saying that the performances are excellent though the warmth each brings to their role is certainly a delight during the relatively quiet second act. To a lesser degree Marsden and Liv Tyler (as Frank’s daughter Madison) help round out the emotional nuance though Marsden is asked to switch gears a few too many times in the final act to get a good bead on his character. Jeremy Strong is surprisingly effective as the obsequious Jake those his severe rattling in the third act diminishes some of what he’d achieved previously in the film.

Although, Robot and Frank is certainly a solid film with solid writing, you can’t help but feel a little bit frustrated that the script doesn’t nail its colours to the mast in terms of what it is actually about and investigate that idea a bit more fully.

What a hellhole this library is!

The script varies from being an interesting look at the way the rise of technology will challenge and change human interaction with the world around them to the somewhat more generic take on a family’s loss of identity as one of their members succumbs to a degenerative disease. Ultimately it plays it safe on both counts (technology is interesting, Alzheimer’s is sad) and thus fall a bit short in saying anything definitive about either.

For example, Frank’s motivating factor is the threat Jennifer’s job as a librarian comes under when Jake wants to revisualise the concept of a library as a communal space. But Jake’s belief is already clearly in evidence in libraries around the country in the present day, so to present it as something scandalous in the near future is a bit disingenuous. Not that we ever get a clear sense of exactly what Jake actually hopes to achieves, so it all just seems to boil down to ‘books are good, yuppies are dumb’. It’s this sort of thing that makes me worry that Robot and Frank’s relevance won’t last long enough to see the year it purports to be set it.

Which is sad because it is a rather sweet film. It’s got Ana Gasteyer in it and all.