Robot and Frank

Overview

Have you ever exchanged quips with Siri? Casually referred to your laptop by a gender-specific pronoun? If so, it's probably not a stretch for you to imagine the day when your devices become more than just your tools, they become your friends. It's not even that we need them to pass the Turing test and trick us into thinking they're human; we'll anthropomorphise at the drop of a hat.

So with such a lovable bag of bolts as the robot in Robot and Frank, probably the first indie robot buddy heist movie, we stand no chance. The caretaker robot enters the life of retired cat burglar Frank (Frank Langella) when his high-flying son, Hunter (James Marsden), and humanitarian daughter, Madison (Liv Tyler), yield to the fact that they don't have time to visit their father in his wilderness home to give him the attention he now needs. Frank is showing signs of dementia, and although the curmudgeon resists this android imposition, he's stuck with it, as only Hunter knows the password to shut him off.

However, Frank's opinion on the robot starts to shift when he realises it's been programmed to do just what's best for his health, with no limitations on the legality of those measures. He soon has the robot picking locks and sitting on stakeouts with him, spectacularly reviving his thieving career, all in the name of keeping his mind and body agile.

As in any buddy movie, the banter between the two leads is key, and in Robot and Frank its magnificent. Grouchy Frank and the indefatigable robot, with the honey voice of Peter Sarsgaard, are a classic odd couple, with the twist that it's Frank's humanity that breathes 'life' into the strictly logical machine; his idiosyncrasies give it a constant puzzle to respond to. When Frank forces the robot into conversation with Mr Darcy, the robot assistant of librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), the two enquire after each other's functioning and then go into stand-by mode.

Along with its hijinks, Robot and Frank has marvellous subtlety and grace of a kind that's almost rare in film. There's a parallel there between the erasure of human and hard-drive memory, questions of when identity begins and ends in each, but these are washed gently over the film by the controlled hands of director Jake Schreier and writer Christopher Ford, for who this is their first feature.

Likewise, the film may be among the first to look at the effects of technological change without judgement or hyperbole, and that ends up being an affecting thing to see. Its robots resembles the current humanoid models you see coming out of Japan, more chunky Lego minifig than sleek automaton, and the world around it still looks familiarly lo-fi. Change, however, is coming to the library, where books are being removed as the institution reorientates to being "a place for community". That's not good or bad, the film says, but it is what's happening. And it is sad. It's unexpected, but by not being reactionary about the moral consequences of technology, Robot and Frank allows true mourning for the world we're leaving behind.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EiFqT5-6JQg