Jake Schreier (2012)

It’s a nice film and I felt ungrateful finding it a bit tedious but I did, because of its benign neatness.  I probably missed things in the plot but this was an instance of deciding after a while that whatever happened was bound to be unsurprising.   Based on a screenplay by Christopher Ford, Jake Schreier’s movie is set in Cold Spring, New York ‘in the near future’ – a place and time in which old people have robots as, in effect, domestic carers and, as the elderly protagonist Frank (Frank Langella) also discovers, companions.  The revelation of this companionship isn’t delayed in order to provide a sentimental climax – it soon becomes part of the texture of the story – although the eventual de-programming of the robot, and Frank’s embrace of it, is a touching moment.  Man and machine interact with admirable naturalness.  It must have helped Frank Langella that there was actually a human being (Rachael Ma) inside the android exterior and the robot’s voice which Peter Sarsgaard supplies has just the right amount of wit and inflection:  enough for you to believe in the growing affection that Frank feels, not so much as to violate the artificially produced nature of the voice.

However, Schreier and Ford also load the dice in favour of the robot by making most of the human beings in Frank’s world tedious.  They include his anthropologist (?) daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) and his attorney son Hunter (James Marsden). Neither of this pair is uncaring exactly, although the effect of their self-centredness and their arguments with each other (Hunter is for the robot and Madison agin it) is to make them seem so.  Frank has spent his adult life as a burglar and a womaniser – he’s anxious to keep both things going although his fading memory means that the woman he’s chasing turns out to be his ex-wife Jennifer (Susan Sarandon) without his realising that until late on in the movie.  Jennifer works in the local library that Frank visits every day:  I wasn’t clear why, since she’s evidently still fond of Frank and living close by, the son and daughter needed to fight so hard over how their father completes his old age.  (I guess the main reason is that Jennifer’s identity isn’t revealed until the closing stages and Schreier and Ford can’t think of anything other than sibling rivalry to plug a gap in the meantime.)

Frank, with the assistance of his robot, is more successful in reviving his burglary career and the filmmakers get you to feel that he’s doing the right thing breaking the law, especially when he steals jewellery (always his speciality as a thief) from the home of the rebarbative young developer (Jeremy Strong) who’s heading a project to turn the library into a kind of pre-digital museum.  Robot & Frank manages, through the richness of Frank’s relationship with the robot, to revitalise the comedy cliché of an OAP behaving badly.   Frank Langella is extremely good – I was much more taken with him here than in Frost/Nixon.  His imposing presence has a nostalgic weight and there’s an ingrained sadness in his face as if the aging Frank (aptly of course) has had his life stolen.  That look of being robbed is also an indication of encroaching dementia although the affliction tends to come and go according to the demands of the plot.  Langella is especially impressive in the final scenes, when Frank has been moved from his own home and into care.   He strikes a fine balance between vacancy and – in order to deliver the film’s punchline – retaining more of his marbles than you’d realised.  (This chimes with the uncertainty you often feel about a friend or relative with Alzheimer’s:  how much of the person you knew has disappeared, how much is still in there somewhere?)  Jake Schreier and Christopher Ford are both young men but they seem to be anticipating here what they may discover in their own, not so near future.   On the other hand, the closure of the library, a main motor of the story in Robot & Frank, suggests the future is already here.

20 March 2013