ROBOT AND FRANK

ROBOT AND FRANK
Written by Christopher D. Ford
Directed by Jake Schreier
Starring Frank Langella, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Susan Sarandon and Peter Sarsgaard

Robot: Hi Frank. It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Frank: How do you know?

As I understand it, aging can be an isolating and confusing time for many, especially when it seems that life has forgotten you and left you to finish out your years alone. When you are retired from work and your family has moved on to families of their own, purpose can be difficult to find. Frank (played by Frank Langella) knows this better than most. He was once a loving husband and father to two vibrant children. He was also once a jewel thief but even jewel thieves eventually get too old to break into homes in the middle of the night.  Fortunately, loneliness, one of mankind’s oldest afflictions, has finally found a solution thanks to the unlikeliest of places - modern technology.

ROBOT AND FRANK, the directorial debut by Jake Schreier, takes place in what appears to be the not-so-distant future. Life is pretty much recognizable in Frank’s world but slight differences pop up here and there so we know it isn’t quite the world you and I know today. The biggest of these tiny nuances would definitely have to be the robots. Frank has just gotten his from his son (James Marsden) to assist with his daily needs. Living all on his own, Frank neglects to clean up after himself or eat properly. The robot, voiced with tranquility and patience by Peter Sarsgaard, is not only there so that his son doesn’t have to make the long trek up from the city each week to make sure Frank is taking care of himself, but also to keep Frank company. Naturally, Frank resists the robot at first, but once he sees how the robot can help him get back to his thieving ways, the two become fast friends.

At the end of the day, a robot is incapable of being someone’s friend but Frank will take what he can get. The people in his life, including his daughter (Liv Tyler) and a librarian in town (Susan Sarandon) do what they can for him, but they all have their own lives too. And as Frank loses a little more of his memory with each day, he learns to rely more and more on the robot, blurring the lines between reality and artificial intelligence. ROBOT AND FRANK is a little movie with big ideas, led by yet another endearing and layered performance by Langella, an actor who constantly disproves the idea that there aren’t any good parts for older actors. And while the film may not be revelatory on any level, it has plenty of charm to please the viewer. In the end , I learned that we can all get by with a little help from a friend, even if that friend is made of metal.

ALL GOOD THINGS

Written by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling

Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella

The trouble with ALL GOOD THINGS starts in the title. We know full well from the very onset of Andrew Jarecki’s first narrative film that the loveliness we are lavished in to begin with will inevitably disappear. After all, the old adage is pretty clear about good things; they must at some point come to an end. And so we watch the happy couple meet, fall in love and run away together, out from under the thumb of an oppressive family and off the road that would lead to nothing but heartache, waiting for the moment where everything turns Fortunately, the turns it takes are unexpected and worse that you would imagine.

If you are familiar with the life of Robert Durst, the millionaire heir to a real estate fortune who stood trial for one murder and was suspected in his life of two others, then you might have a very good idea of what to expect. ALL GOOD THINGS is loosely based on his life and he is portrayed in the film by Ryan Gosling, renamed David Marks. Ideally cast, Gosling is able to play happy yet hesitant and transition smoothly to unnerving and disconcerting without blinking, catching us all as off guard as his co-star, Kirsten Dunst. She plays his wife, Katie Marks, who went missing in the 80’s after their relationship became abusive and she threatened to leave. As solid as Gosling is, he is outdone by Dunst, who is surprisingly subtle and has a strong grasp on how internalized the plight of a battered spouse truly is. As facile as the execution of the film is at times, their performances give it the weight needed to pull it off.

Jarecki is the Oscar-nominated director on CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, a truly disturbing documentary about a family with secrets so dark they should only be shared with those strong enough to face the atrocities man is truly capable of. It would seem a natural fit for him to take on one of the most infamous family dramas in American history but he never gets to the real root of the issues. The ugly truth worked for him before but here, Jarecki is either afraid of it or just not aware of it. Either way, ALL GOOD THINGS comes to its own end, proving that the proverb doesn’t just apply to things that are good.