89 minutes. Rated PG-13.
After you wipe my memory, things can go back to normal and you can continue planning your next job.
Robot and Frank is the story of an aging cat burglar Frank Langella and his accomplice, a robotic home health aid whose personality might be a product of Frank’s loneliness and memory loss… or not. As his memory deteriorates, Frank’s care becomes a more and more serious problem for his highly photogenic, but uninvolved, family, and the robot seems to be the answer to all of their concerns. But Frank resists the Robot’s new regimen of health food and exercise–until he realizes that he can infect it with his own enthusiasm for jewel theft.
The main question posed by this visually attractive piece is whether a thing can become a person–or a person a thing–based on how it is treated. Frank very much becomes an object over the course of the film, eventually becoming an inactive, but less troublesome, idealized doddering old man. His personality essentially obliterated with his memories, he finally becomes the father and husband that his family wants when he is completely senile. Robot, on the other hand, is a threat to Frank’s family as long as its own memories are intact. Not only does Frank replace his family with Robot, but Robot is willing to take Frank as he is, snappish temperament and unusual vocation included.
Frank probably has much more in common with the robot than with anyone else in the film, including his kids. His son, an upstanding businessman who is ashamed of his father’s past vocation and present senility, sees the robot home health aide as a cheap alternative to a nursing home, while his inept, artsy daughter sees it initially as a political issue having little to do with her father’s well-being. Neither sticks around, but each wants a stake in Frank’s life. Their selfish behavior is oddly discordant with Frank’s give-and-take relationship with Robot.
Like Frank, Robot’s memory is at best an unwelcome threat to the family’s equilibrium and at worst a potential criminal witness. Both eventually forget everything, which replaces them within the boundaries of acceptable society. Most viewers will agree, however, that the lucid Frank and Robot team are far more fun than their socially acceptable, but dull and confused, amnesiac counterparts. The parallel between Frank’s lost memories and the manner in which Frank takes jewelry is impossible to ignore; everything in this film is more valuable when it’s gone.
Frank’s memory troubles are more often than not inherently hilarious, particularly in the reactions they evoke from other human beings. A shop owner who Frank regularly steals from explodes at his presence, but Frank can’t remember why…even as he lifts another next-to-worthless tchotchke. Senile Frank’s classical burglary of the annoyingly techy ruiner of the library (Jeremy Strong) is both satisfying and hilarious, even though Strong’s character is somewhat caricaturishly arrogant.
Frank Langella really makes this movie work. A highly active veteran of both stage and screen, and notable recently for his work in Frost/Nixon and Kitchen Confidential, he pulls off a simultaneously funny, sweet, and dignified performance that very few other actors could aspire to. Though it relied heavily on scenery, many of the more dialogue-heavy bits of Robot and Frank could have worked just as well on a bare stage. It’s no wonder that Robot and Frank won Sundance in 2012.
Robot and Frank is very well put-together and operates on a number of profound levels. The world so lushly depicted with wide shots, minimal special effects, and flawless cinematography is plausible as a near future version of current upper-middle-class life. It fits together extremely well, and whether or not every piece works (particularly the one about libraries being completely a thing of the past), this film is a funny and thought-provoking experience that is not to be missed.
