Robot & Frank (2012)
Directed by Jake Schreier
Curmudgeonly old Frank lives by himself. His routine involves daily visits to his local library, where he has a twinkle in his eye for the librarian. His grown children are concerned about their father’s well-being and buy him a caretaker robot. Initially resistant to the idea, Frank soon appreciates the benefits of robotic support – like nutritious meals and a clean house – and eventually begins to treat his robot like a true companion. With his robot’s assistance, Frank’s passion for his old, unlawful profession is reignited, for better or worse.
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What critics compared Robot & Frank to
The concept of a robot programmed to fulfill the role of dedicated helpmate to the human, no matter what, is reminiscent of Duncan Jones’ Moon.
The robot, never named, is voiced by Peter Sarsgaard in what we now know is The Most Perfect Role For Peter Sarsgaard Ever – like Kevin Spacey in Moon, it’s a worthy follow-up to HAL 9000 that nonetheless becomes the actor’s own thing.
The robot of the title is one such helper, a “healthcare aide” who looks like a children’s toy from the 1980s and speaks (as voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) in the recognizable soothing tones of movie robots from 2001: A Space Odyssey through Moon .
From the $7000 “Primer” to the $5 million “Moon,” their respective filmmakers managed to put forth some interesting ideas without being hindered creatively by their minimal budgets.
Unimaginatively directed by Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank”), the film benefits from its confidence in the page-turning pull of its random but breathless plotting, which borrows as much from “Nancy Drew” as from John Hughes.
Director Jake Schreier previously showed a flair for older interior lives with “Robot & Frank.”
Paper Towns, which was directed by Jake Schreier (who made a very good indie movie called Robot & Frank several years ago) and written by Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter (who also wrote the film adaptation of Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, as well as The Spectacular Now and 500 Days of Summer), purports to be a romance, and then a mystery, but it turns out to be something else altogether.
An engaging cast and talented director–Jake Schreier, who made “Robot & Frank”–work hard to keep the movie afloat, but in the end the blandness does it in.
Where director Jake Schreier ("Robot & Frank") succeeds, thanks to Wolff and a charming cast, is in creating a warm portrait of friends striking out on a final adventure before graduation and adulthood.
It’s not a scattershot approach, per se; what it is, is deliberately weird, pulling signifiers from a range of nominally similar films (Robocop, say, or Videodrome, or even the notably more sunny Robot & Frank) but deploying them in ways that keep the viewer off kilter.
But, for all the breathy emoting (on both sides), there's little here to rival the bond that emerges, for example, between Frank Langella and his automated housemate in the underappreciated Robot & Frank , meaning that Her runs the risk of becoming a little too arch for its own good.