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.

The Strangers

“The Strangers” is one of the most intense films I’ve seen in many a moon, and one of the better films of the year. I feel bad about that, because it’s really nothing more than two people being terrorized for 90 minutes. It’s also loaded with implausabilities, and characters doing stupid things.

But it does what it sets out to do, which is to scare the hell out of the audience, and on that score, the film succeeds admirably. My stomach was in knots throughout the whole movie, and stayed that way on the drive home.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star as a couple who come home late one evening from a wedding reception. They are staying at his family’s vacation home, an isolated one with no neighbors close by. He’s proposed marriage and she says she’s not ready yet. Things are a little tense between them. As they’re talking they hear a pounding on the door. Not a gentle knock, but a loud, insistent pounding, not the kind of noise you want to hear at 4 a.m. They open the door and it’s a young woman looking for Tamara. We never see her, she’s in shadows. They tell her she has the wrong house and she goes away.

He leaves the house to give them some time apart. Tyler’s alone in the house when the pounding begins again, even more forceful this time, accompanied by other strange scraping noises and bangings heard outside. She calls him to come back. The terror escalates when she spots a hooded figure outside the window, peering in.

He arrives and the rest of the movie is the couple trying to stay alive against the three hooded intruders (one man and two women). They don’t know why they’re being targeted, and every avenue of escape seems blocked.

Of course it being a horror film there are implausabilities galore. The first time the girl comes back, and the pounding becomes more insistent, she calls her boyfriend instead of the police. Not too smart. And after all they’ve been through, why does he tell her to wait in the house while he tries for the barn, even with three hooded figures stalking them? I don’t think so.

What’s most effective about the film is how it plays on our fear of the unknown. Anyone who has ever gotten a phone call in the dead of night knows the heart-in-the-throat feeling when the phone rings. Hearing a pounding on the door at 4 a.m. fills us with the same dread.

We never see who is under those hoods, though we’re teased. The constant onslaught of noises with no idea of where they’re coming from origin is creepy too.

Liv Tyler, an actress I’ve never particularly cared for, is especially good here. It’s a physically draining performance and I’m sure she’s looking for a nice romantic comedy for her next role. Speedman is OK, I guess, nothing bad but nothing particularly memorable either.

On the debit side, I wish Tyler and Speedman hadn’t seen the urge to whisper their lines in the early scenes, to the point it was hard to hear what they were saying to each other. No crucial plot points are missed, but it’s annoying all the same.

The film’s director, Bryan Bertino, does a good job of tightening the vise, and is smart enough to keep the proceedings under 90 minutes. There are a couple of scenes where we see the intruders in the background and in the next scene they’re gone. It’s effective the first couple of times, but becomes stale as the movie goes on as it gets repeated too often.

“The Strangers” is a semi-remake of a French film called “Them” which came out last year. It’s supposed to be even scarier, and I’m going to seek it out.

Rating for “The Strangers”: Three stars.