Movie Review: Frank Langella in Robot & Frank
In American movies, old people tend to be cute or crotchety, though sometimes theyre both. Ruth Gordon is cute in Harold and Maude and somewhat cute if also somehow menacing, at least at first, in Rosemarys Baby. (Later, when the old lady comes out as a Satanist, shes the ne plus ultra of crotchety: evil.) In Robot & Frank, an eager-to-please story set in the near future about an elderly gent, his robot and some awkwardly managed truths about old age, Frank Langella plays so many variations on cute and crotchety and with such suppleness hes by turns a charming codger, a silver fox and a wise graybeard that his performance comes close to a saving grace.
Frank (Mr. Langella) enters the story like a man in trouble. His milk has gone bad and his house is ! edging i nto the sort of chaos that might one day swallow him up, like one of those eccentrics entombed in a lifetimes worth of empty pickle jars and mildewy copies of National Geographic. He seems alone and adrift, but hes actually tethered to his loving children, a realist, Hunter (James Marsden), and a dreamer, Madison (Liv Tyler), who check in with him via a screen looming above his fireplace. Once, an ancestral portrait heavy with generational weight might have hung in that spot, but this being a gently dystopian tale its the faces of the descendants who flicker there.
Frank doesnt seem to mind all that much. He has other things preoccupying him, including the books he borrows, the trifles he swipes and his bewildering, changing world, although he minds very much when Hunter decides that his messy, increasingly forgetful father needs a minder. Ignoring Franks protests, Hunter delivers a gleaming white machine a VGC-60L that stands about five feet tall out of the box and has articulated limbs, a head that looks like a motorcycle helmet and a soft, insinuating voice which suggests that Peter Sarsgaard prepared for his vocal role by repeatedly listening to HAL 9000 apologize to Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The performer Rachael Ma, tucked inside the robot, gives it persuasive motion as it toddles along as butler, dog and scold.)
The robot and Frank make a predictable odd couple, one that the first-time featu! re direc tor Jake Schreier, working from Christopher D. Fords script, tries to sell with smiles and soft comedy. Thats too bad because Mr. Sarsgaard, his silky voice oozing, is onto something appropriately creepy, and Mr. Langella, who can be a ferocious, thrillingly powerful screen presence, has it in him to take this ingratiating story somewhere dark or at least someplace deeper. Yet while the filmmakers are willing to show Franks vulnerability, as in some early scenes of him wandering perilously alone or just talking with a sympathetic librarian, Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), they keep pushing him onto safer ground. They also pile on the complications in what seems like an effort to blunt the sadness.
Robot & Frank isnt especially funny, though it tries hard to make you laugh, particularly with a belabored subplot involving Franks former bad habits, which he tries to revive with the help of the robot. These hijinks almost derail it, but late in the movie theres an anguished scene in which Frank and Jennifer, by looking at some photos, bridge the past and present. Within moments, as she gazes into his face, as if searching for the imponderable, and he storms off, these two actors summon up the transformative, unhealed pain of a devastating loss. The exchange is a jolt and it briefly shifts the movie into a more truthful, difficult emotional register that acknowledges what it means for someone to fade away. Almost by accident, the filmmakers open a vein.
Robot & Frank is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Intimations of mortality.
Robot & Frank
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jake Schreier; written by Christopher D. Ford; director of photography, Matthew J. Lloyd; edited by Jacob Craycroft; music by Francis and the Lights; p! roductio n design by Sharon Lomofsky; produced by Galt Niederhoffer, Sam Bisbee, Lance Acord and Jackie Kelman; released by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Frank Langella (Frank), Susan Sarandon (Jennifer), James Marsden (Hunter), Liv Tyler (Madison), Peter Sarsgaard (voice of Robot), Rachael Ma (Robot Performer), Jeremy Sisto (Sheriff Rowlings) and Jeremy Strong (Jake).
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