Robot & Frank (2012)
Frank Langella plays a retired man with early signs of Alzheimers. He has two children who are concerned about him. He has his son, played by James Marsden, who is very busy with work but still makes the effort to come and visit him and receives little in the way of cooperation for his efforts. Then on the other hand we have his daughter, Liv Tyler, who is a big leftie spending most of her time on projects abroad (supposedly voluntary rather than professional).
The film is set in the future, so Langella is actually essentially what men currently in their 20s and 30s are going to become when they grow old. One figure in the film pretty much treats Langella as a relic because he lived during the era of 'the printed word'. Still, Langella is clearly not a technophobe. He has little trouble with the advanced technology around him, happily communicating with his daughter via a video screen.
Marsden decides to give Langella a robot to look after him. Langella is not entirely keen on the robot, partly because it's newer technology than he's used to, but also because he doesn't want a nanny. However, and this is the main point of the film, he finds himself becoming very attached to the robot, particularly when he realises that it doesn't have any moral qualms about stealing. Langella's character actually being an ex-cat-burglar who, feeling rather bored, misses his glory days planning robberies.
Initially I thought this film was being extremely clever, since Langella seemed to be able to get away with stealing all too easily. I wondered whether the 'victims' actually knew he was stealing all along and that it playing into their hands somehow. But sadly the film wasn't anything like so subtle and towards the end there were a few twists that were as heavy-handed as they were underwhelming.
The relationship between Frank (played by Frank Langella) and his robot is very well handled and some of this film is very funny. However, the filmmakers appear to have had absolutely no idea how to end this film. It's a real pity because what was a wonderfully enjoyable watch ended up feeling rather flat and inconsequential.
Do not underestimate how much the ending played in causing me to mark down this film. This is well worth checking out and it's very possible that you won't be so let down by the ending as I was. But for me the ending is a massive stumbling block to what might otherwise have been easily a B+ movie, at very least. The film has a lot of heart, some very thoughtful moments, a great deal that is very funny and Frank Langella is utterly brilliant in the central role. There was even a rather clever central theme paralleling Frank's story with that of Don Quixote. This film had a great deal going for it, if only the filmmakers had a better idea of how to wrap things up.
C+
Mary and Martha (2013 TV Movie)
There's an odd combination of talents here. On the one hand there's Phillip Noyce, director of "Salt" and "". The main stars are Brenda Blethyn (one of the actresses who always reminds of Julie Walters but isn't her) and Hilary Swank. James Woods is apparently in this, but even when I worked out which part he was playing I still couldn't quite believe it was him. And finally (and this may be the odd one out here) Richard Curtis is the writer.
Richard Curtis knocked everyone's socks off with "Four Weddings And A Funeral" and while he's done a fair amount else that has been very entertaining (not least the wonderful Van Gogh centred Doctor Who episode), very little of it has really reached the same standard. A great deal of Curtis's work seems to be following a formula to play on the heart strings and can be hard to really take seriously.
I can see how Phillip Noyce felt this was an important film to make. He's clearly putting his all into making every scene work emotionally and visually. But unfortunately there's just line after line which just grates somehow. Hilary Swank's character keeps referring to people as bastards. She's not saying this about people around her, just people she references. At one point she refers to a figure in African history as a bastard and then later on she even refers to the fictional character of Marty McFly from "Back To The Future" as a bastard (seemingly because he has a time machine and she doesn't *shrugs*).
While it's quirky for some characters to meet an African in Mozambique who prefers country and western music, little quirky details like this became a bit tired after a while.
On the one hand, Brenda Blethyn plays a working class British mother with a drop-out son who goes on a gap year to teach in Mozambique and dies of Malaria after giving away his preventative pills to the orphans living in the school where he teaches. Meanwhile, Hilary Swank plays a super rich American mother who decides to take her son out of the state school where he is being bullied; not so she can put him into a wonderful private school which she could so clearly afford, but rather to teach him herself during a life-changing trip to Mozambique. While in Africa, it turns out they inexplicably managed to buy a battered mosquito net with big a hole in it. Her son gets bitten and is too far gone before she can work out what is wrong with him.
The two mothers eventually decide to campaign for the American government to provide increased levels of aid to Africa in order to lessen the enormous numbers of deaths.
The first half of the film is rather sweet, but the second half gets excessively preachy. I felt rather betrayed by the way that the film went from dealing with multiple real characters to a couple of mothers involved in mutual navel-gazing grief. It would have been nice if some of the native Africans could have been made into 3 dimensional characters, rather than spending a whole load of time in the second half over in America watching a rich American woman lobby her local representative.
D-