Robot and Frank (aka You Must Have Fell On Your Head As A Baby, You Really Know How To Hurt Yourself)

The first question worth exploring about Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank (2012) is whether it offers an optimistic vision of "the near future", in which robotic assistants have become a familiar part of our everyday landscape, at least for the senior citizens among us. The answer is yes, but also no. The futuristic world of Robot & Frank is hardly a dystopia - there's not even a sense of it bubbling below the surface. It examines the ways in which technology might continue to grow and re-shape our lives, and our dependency on said technology as it becomes workaday, yet the technology itself is entirely benign, the story is small in scope and the pace accordingly gentle. The most dramatic event happening in the wider community are the plans of trendy yuppies to renovate the local library to be less about the books and more about the "library experience". There's also some inkling of a broader debate going on about the ethics of building robots to take on jobs traditionally fulfilled by paid humans, but it's not front and centre to the narrative. As a future, it seems entirely inhabitable, just replete with sadness. But it's the same sadness that already permeates the here and now, and has dogged us for all of human history - the realisation that we are not built to last. The titular Frank Weld (Frank Langella) is an early stage dementia sufferer, the robot (played by Rachael Ma and voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) an artificially intelligent carer entrusted to keep him out of trouble as his memory erodes. Such a robot might represent the height of human technical innovation, but its very presence also provides an uneasy mirror to our own fragility, and to the inevitability of our own decline. Robot & Frank is a film that has stuck with me over the years, partly for its quirky story about a natural born outlaw who turns the symbol of his degradation to his own cunning advantage, but also for its honest and poignant portrayal of the onset of old age, and the fear of losing touch with your sense of who you are. The film's key concern is with the relationship between memory and identity, and how you hang onto the latter when the former is wont to betray you.

Even before his fading memory drove a wedge between himself and the rest of the world, Frank has always been something of a societal outcast. In his youth he was a professional cat burglar - in his words a "second storey man" - who specialised in lifting priceless jewellery. For his crimes, he ultimately served sixteen years in prison, although most of those were technically for tax evasion. As Frank tells it, the tax evasion rap was garbage, but his expertise as a thief was clearly a source of tremendous pride to him; in his twilight years, he's been left with few comforts besides the knowledge that he was once pretty good at stealing from the rich. His family life has largely disintegrated - his wife has been out of the picture for three decades (or so we're lead to believe), his daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) is a charity worker who spends most of her time overseas, while his son Hunter (James Marsden) makes weekly commutes but would sooner put his father into a full-time care facility (euphemistically described as a "Memory Center"), a matter of heated contention between the two. Frank is nostalgic for the glory days of his erstwhile criminal career, his only outlet for which is in his routine visits to a local cosmetics store, where he's made an enemy of the owner (Ana Gasteyer) with his tendency to slip bars of soap shaped like animals into his pocket. He gets a more sympathetic reception from Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), the librarian whose workplace is currently being remodelled beyond all recognition, and with whom Frank feels an intuitive connection. Both of them belong to worlds that seem fated to be left behind by the relentless march of time - Frank with his increasing temporal confusion, Jennifer with her preference for the printed word over augmented reality.

Hunter eventually settles on a compromise - he brings Frank a robotic caregiver (in more technical terms, a VCG-60L), as an alternative to forcing him into the Memory Center, although from Frank's perspective this is a no less damning judgement on his cognitive prowess. What could be a more sure-fire indication that his best days are behind him than requiring a hunk of metal to keep him in check? At first, the robot is about as much fun as Frank anticipates, insisting that he swap his favourite cereal for healthier breakfast options ("That cereal is for children, Frank." "You're for children!") and take up non-threatening hobbies in which Frank has little interest, such as growing tomato plants. He's also mortified at the thought of Jennifer sighting him out in public with the thing. His perspective changes, however, when he discovers a quirk in the robot's AI that greatly appeals to him, in that it has only a surface-level understanding of human law and order; it can parrot dictionary definitions of crime, but it can't elaborate on what any of that means. It passes no judgement on Frank for his criminal past (outside of acknowledging that it is a touchy subject for Hunter); better still, it has no objections to serving his thieving impulses in the present. Its single impetus is to help Frank, whether that entails prompting him to eat more healthily, or assisting him with his habitual shoplifting. Suddenly, the robot becomes less a signifier of Frank's incontrovertible decline than it does his ticket to rejuvenation. From there on in, it's just a matter of training the robot to pick locks and crack safes so that it can assist him in a far more ambitious project, one specifically targeting Jake (Jeremy Strong), the obnoxious upstart dictating the future of Jennifer's library. Jake is the film's most one-dimensional character, albeit to a purpose - it gets around the fact that Frank robs him by making him as odious as humanly possible (as in-joke, he's also named after the film's director). Much as Frank seems to identify a kindred spirit in Jennifer, Jake seems to instinctively recognise Frank, a man from the bygone age of printed information, as a threat, and makes a point of belittling him from the moment they make eye contact.

Frank has vivid recollections of the jobs he used to pull as a burglar, and of the flashy high-end shit everyone wore back in the day, but there's an obvious disconnect where human relationships are concerned; he vaguely recalls the "knockout redhead" he was involved with at the time of a particularly ambitious job in a high-rise in Florida, but doesn't remember her name. He doesn't seem to fare much better with his family relations, something foreshadowed in one of the earliest scenes, when Madison attempts to make contact from Turkmenistan via video call, and a loss of connection occurs - technology may be as unreliable in the near future as it is right now, but no more so than the human brain.

It becomes apparent that Frank's commitment to inducing the robot into the world of breaking and entering is about more than simply recapturing the adrenalin rushes of yore and demonstrating that he's still a light-fingered force to be reckoned with - rather, passing on his specialist knowledge, esoteric as it may be, is a way of compensating for lost time, by using the robot as a substitute for the connections he was unable to forge with his children. Frank confides with the robot that one of his life's greatest regrets is in never teaching Hunter the tricks of his burglary trade - tellingly, Frank intermittently talks to the robot as if it were Hunter, which is a reflection of his addled mental state, but also the degree to which he projects onto the robot his yearning for a closer bond with his son. Frank is troubled by the gaps in his memory with regards to his children, but these have less to do with his dementia than with the fact that they were only second-hand memories to begin with; Frank was in prison for most of their childhoods, so he experienced their growth and development vicariously, though whatever information his family cared to share with him. Frank expresses awareness of an incident where one of them burned a hole in the carpet, but is not sure if it was Madison or Hunter. Passing on his own knowledge is also a means of procuring a legacy for himself, and it's from this perspective that Frank's conflation of the robot with his son speaks to the broader degree to which the robots represent an attempt on the part of their human creators to transcend their own mortality - they are beings molded in our own likeness, and they might well inherit the Earth once we've shuffled off it (although Frank's robot is nonplussed when this particular idea is put to it). The ability to pass down the skills and knowledge he has accumulated, to something that can retain them even after his own diminishing brain has given out, provides a vital lifeline to Frank (and you might think that cat burglary is morally questionable, but as Schreier and screenwriter Christopher D. Ford point out on the DVD commentary, the kind of meticulous planning and execution required to pull these kinds of heists off makes it an art form unto itself). The robot becomes a vessel for the part of Frank he fears he is in danger of losing, and a means of getting around the fact that his son, who might have fulfilled the role of successor under a more traditional set of circumstances, has rejected Frank and his way of life. The use of the robot as a proxy for human interaction is a process that works both ways, with Hunter flat-out admitting at the film's climax that he brought the robot into the equation because he didn't want to have to put up with Frank full-time himself. The robot's function is to act as a buffer between the two; the technology of Robot & Frank might be fundamentally benign, but there is something faintly troubling about the characters' application of it, in how it offsets the need to repair their broken connections. Their reliance on technology is implied to be symptomatic of their basic human failure to communicate.

One of the film's most enigmatic qualities is in the aura of ambiguity it maintains at all times around its pivotal robot. You can project whatever you want onto it, as each of the Welds do. To Frank, the robot is a companion, accomplice and his new lease on life, to Hunter it is an appliance designed to alleviate his own guilt, while to Madison is an unpleasant symbol of societal degradation (Madison is opposed to robot labor, in theory, but it's a stance she eventually backs down from, when she realises how much harder it is to keep Frank's house in order without it). The nature of the bot's intelligence, and of its relationship with Frank, is left open to interpretation; the character who is most at pains to argue that the robot is not a real being and should not be regarded as such is actually the robot itself. Early on, it seems to imply otherwise, when it confides in Frank its concern that if it fails to take good care of him, it will be returned to the warehouse and have its memories wiped, a disclosure that appears to open up a degree of common ground with Frank and his own wariness of being regulated to the Memory Center. Later on, the robot directly contradicts this, insisting that this was all just a cunning bit of emotional blackmail designed to get Frank to comply, and that it places no value on its memories. This doubles as a warning to the audience not to get overly attached to the robot as a character, but since we only ever see the robot through Frank's eyes, it asks too much of us. Fact is, the robot is too endearing, and too benevolent for us not to warm to it, and to not feel the sting when Frank is faced with the possibility of having to destroy the connection they've forged. He discovers that there is, in fact, a downside to using a robot as your partner in crime - should the robot be seized by the authorities, its memory data can be checked and will contain evidence of his illicit activities. This creates a dilemma when the law gets wind of Frank's re-entry into the burglary arena and the robot suggests that Frank might want to consider erasing its data as a precaution. Frank is strongly opposed to doing this; by now, it's evident that he's developed an attachment to the robot as a companion (enough so to object when Madison takes to treating it like a personal slave), but it would also mean throwing away the part of himself that he has invested in the robot. Yet the robot seems unmoved by Frank's attempts to ascribe it deeper qualities, regarding its artifice with an awareness that seems almost paradoxical ("You think, therefore you are...in a similar way, I know that I'm not alive"). Frank finds such discussion objectionable - understandably, he would prefer not to think of his closest companion as being an illusion, but on a deeper level, the robot's words act as a memento mori, playing into Frank's fear that his own reality will eventually be negated. Its ease with its professed non-existence is jarring to Frank's imperative to keep fighting to reassert his own being. This takes on additional resonance when we consider that the memories it claims not to value are those specifically of its time with Frank and all that he has taught it - in this way, the robot becomes less a reflection of Frank's desire for self-preservation than it does a mouthpiece for the general impassivity that stretches beyond him.

What, if anything, is going on inside that robot's noggin? Hard to say; the robot is a child-like figure, although it is tempting to try to read a kind of wisdom into its affectlessness - there are times where its inability to grasp the moral ramifications of stealing plays less like innocence than it does a general indifference toward the messiness of the human condition. There are flashes of personality too. Its malleability, and the manner in which it allows Frank to educate it and influence its behaviour culminates in a show of apparent sassiness on the robot's part, when it absorbs casual advice Frank dispenses about resisting the harassment of over-inquisitive teenagers, and later uses this, wittily, to fend off Jake. Still, the robot insists to the end that it is not real, the only concession it makes being in acknowledging that it hurts Frank to hear it. Heavy spoilers now follow: we know the robot is capable of manipulating Frank in order to prompt certain behaviours from him, so we do have the option of interpreting the robot's final insistence that he destroy its memory data as an altruistic gesture on its part. Even so (and despite what the film's Wikipedia synopsis would imply) this isn't actually the reason why Frank eventually chooses to relinquish his bond with his mechanical friend. There is additional dialogue, in which the robot repeats information that Frank had casually divulged to it, ("Lifting that high-end stuff, no one gets hurt except those insurance company crooks"), and which clearly disturbs Frank. Again, we wonder if the robot knows what it is doing, in turning Frank's own words back on him. What is apparent is that Frank's termination of the robot amounts to a relinquishment of himself. He might be disturbed at the extent to which he has corrupted the robot; on another level, the robot may be an uneasy indication of how Hunter might have turned out, had he followed more closely in his father's footsteps. Having externalised himself, his life's work and the values that guided him into the robot, Frank chooses to let it all go; hitting the off-switch is both a rejection of the person who he was (albeit a highly mournful one) and a resignation to the fact that he cannot go on forever. In the end, he embraces the non-functional robot just as he embraces his own impending oblivion.

Crucially, this all follows after the picture's big twist, revealing to both Frank and to the viewer the extent to which the former's memories have already degraded. After escaping the police with the robot, Frank seeks refuge with Jennifer; backstage in her territory, he makes the shocking discovery that she has pictures of Hunter and Madison on her wall, and photographs of herself and Frank at an earlier point in life, and realises that she is the ex-wife who left him 30 years ago (for all we know, she might even be the "knockout redhead" he'd reminisced about earlier). The dialogue used to explain this twist is entirely minimal (says Jennifer, "When I moved back, you just didn't remember"), and it is the narrative's most divisive development, with some viewers finding it overwhelmingly poignant, and others questioning its plausibility. Could Frank really just up and forget this woman with whom he'd forged such a vital bond multiple decades back? On a thematic level, it is the ultimate signifier of Frank's disconnect from his family, a disconnect that clearly pre-dates the onset of his dementia, whether it came from his enforced separation or his greater interest in his criminal career. But it also speaks of the paradoxical degree to which memory forms both the basis of identity and the means to navigate forward, and a burden that keeps its bearers entrapped in the past. I am not proposing that Frank's suppression of his prior history with Jennifer was intentional, but his acceptance of her as a whole new person does seem symptomatic of a desire to start anew by rejecting the traumas of the past. Whatever happened previously between Frank and Jennifer and the precise details behind their marriage's disintegration are not expanded on - we see their relationship only as it survives in the present, as a mutual nostalgia for another time, one that is permitted to exist adrift out of time. But while Frank's desire is to begin again anew and to undo the mistakes of the past, Jennifer is all-too aware that the world has moved on; she sees in Frank not an opportunity to start over, but an avenue that is closing off. We can see how the renovations going on at the library mirror Jennifer's plight in terms of her relationship with Frank - Jake aligns Frank with the printed media he is intent on expunging from the venue, and just as Jennifer watches the tome she has maintained be removed and tossed out, she must contend with the fact that Frank is slowly eroding, along with the aspects of her own identity she had previously invested into their connection. Much as Jennifer is determined to stay on and watch over the library in its current state, so too is her only recourse to try to adapt and connect with Frank as he exists in the present. Frank's initial theft, before he moves onto casing Jake's abode, is of an antique copy of Don Quixote, which was going to be sent away to be preserved, but which Frank felt that Jennifer should be allowed to keep - viewed from the perspective that the book represents Frank's endangered identity, it echoes his resistance to entering the Memory Center, and his desire to remain in his temporal no man's land with Jennifer, even as he goes about it in a flagrantly self-destructive way.

The film's epilogue reveals that Frank has moved into the Memory Center, where he is visited by Hunter, Madison and Jennifer. The ending seems to uphold the importance of human connection over technological innovation - this is the only point in the narrative in which the Welds all appear together, and with nary a robotic being in sight. In line with his prior rejection of himself, via the robot, Frank expresses relief that his children did not turn out like him: "That's one thing that I don't have to worry about - my son did better than his old man." To a point, the premise of Robot & Frank seems reminiscent of Ron Howard's Cocoon (1985), blending science fiction with a senior citizen's quest for immortality, although it reaches the opposite conclusion to Howard's stargazing fantasy, with its protagonist being brought back down to Earth and accepting his decline as something he must make peace with. You might recall how, in Cocoon, the rejection of mortality was explicitly equated with the rejection of nature; said one character, "The way nature's been treating us, I don't mind cheating her a little." By contrast, Schreier's film incorporates a subtle message about the necessity of tending to the Earth; immortality, it suggests, is to be attained not by turning your back on the Earthly existence, but within the soil and in the very rhythms of nature. The image of the robot watering the tomato plants recalls Dewey at the end of Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972); one of the more optimistic aspects of Robot & Frank is that it does not see nature and technology as diametrically opposed - in fact, nature maintains a more dominant presence in the picture's setting more than the technological world, with most of the story taking place against the woodlands of upstate New York (Frank reports that he saw a bobcat the other day). The robot's insistence on starting a garden, which seemed like the kind of menial, inoffensive task that should make Frank want to gag, is all about regeneration, planting the seeds on which the next generation can thrive, and this is something that Frank eventually makes good on. Of course, in this case there is a bit of a cheeky subversion, with the actual renewal coming not from the literal seeds per se, but from what Frank has concealed with them. The force Frank ends up cheating is not Mother Nature, but Father Time, as personified by the character of Jake. Frank might have to consign himself to the same fate as Jennifer's printed media, but before he does he manages to turn back the clock a little and steal millions of dollars' worth of jewellery from Jake, which the law is never able to uncover, giving him the means through which to finally provide for his children and leave them something on which to build their future. As their visit ends, Frank slips Hunter a note, indicating that the jewels are buried beneath the robot's tomato plants, and that he wants Hunter and Madison to have them. In other words, the film gets to have its cake and eat it; Frank's fierce individuality, as expressed through his thieving tendencies, might be the factor that had previously kept the family apart, but it is what ultimately facilitates the family's deliverance. With a little assistance from the gentler tendencies of the robot, that is.

The robot is not forgotten at the end. The last images are of Frank roaming the corridors of the Memory Center and sighting another resident with a robotic assistant in tow, a VCG-60L, the very same model as his own. For a second, Frank is gripped by the hope that it is his own - the robot seems to take an interest in him, but it continues on its way. He then sees another VCG-60L walk by, and resigns himself to the reality that his friend is gone for good, lost in a sea of identical models; it is, likewise, a resignation to the fact that he is fated to have his own identity erased through the disintegration of his memory and, after that, the universal leveller of death. It is an indifferent world to man and mecha alike. Robot & Frank doesn't have a lot that feels overwhelmingly positive so say about the process of getting old. But does communicate, with tremendous empathy, the universality of the problem, and both the isolation and the kinship that emanate from our imperfect machinery.

Finally, I couldn't cover Robot & Frank without saying a few words about the soundtrack by Francis and The Lights (aka Francis Farewell Starlite). The score has a mournful, dreamy quality that feels reminiscent of a divagating train of thought attempting to get back to wherever it was originally going. Even better are the closing credits, which show footage of the real artificially intelligent creations that inspired the VCG-60L, and are accompanied by the track "Fell On Your Head", a quirkily-written throwback to the 1980s pop rock of Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and their ilk. It's a retro sound that seems strangely at home alongside the unassuming future depicted in Robot & Frank. As far as I'm aware, "Fell On Your Head" never got a commercial release, not even on the Robot & Frank soundtrack that came out in 2013. At the time, Starlite stated in a tweet that it would be on his upcoming album, but...it was not. He's had two albums since R&F and there's not been not a peep out of "Fell On Your Head", so I think it's safe to say that it may have fallen by the wayside. Ah well, shame. Just one more factor making the movie so distinguished, if it's still the track's only official outlet.