Robot And Frank (12A)

Hollywood is as predictable as a politician - they spot a trend and chase it as hard and fast as they can in a bid to milk more cash out of the general population. The difference is that, occasionally, Hollywood gets it right.

While the bean counters in Tinseltown have spotted the population is ageing, they've also worked out that the old folks have the money.

The answer?

Old folks must want films about old folks. Obviously.

Now, granted this has seen geriatric action heroes taking to the screens (Stallone and Schwarzenegger, hang your ravaged turkey-necks in shame), and old people run hotels or take up singing, it has also given us films such as Amour - a foreign language flick so universally loved and lauded that it actually broke into the mainstream award categories.

And it's given us Robot And Frank. For which we should be supremely grateful.

Set in "the near future", on the surface it's a film about care and the family. With Frank's marbles slowly starting to not bounce (brilliantly captured by Frank Langella), the wife long gone and the children busy with their own lives, it's decided that he needs a robot to help take care of him.

What the film is really about is love and friendship. And while many a film has been happy for that to be it, in Robot And Frank, the telling of the tale and the development of the characters makes it somehow more than that.

We meet Frank - a famed burglar who has done two prison stretches - as he sets about his latest raid. He may be old, but he's calm, he's stealthy, he's adept, he's burgling his own house... And it's here that the often tricky subject of Alzheimer's is broached. Now, traditionally there are two ways you deal with this subject (or any serious illness that people can be afraid of facing) - you either laugh at it, or you tug at the heart-strings until they come away in your hand.

Robot And Frank tread the rarely used third path.

We see the condition from the victim's perspective (mostly denying it, sometimes realising what's wrong), the family's perspective (trying to deal with it, but not knowing quite what to do as the transition from child to carer arrives), and the carer's perspective.

In this case, the carer is Robot. And it's here that the film gets it just right.

Between them, first-time director Jake Schreir and writer Christopher D Ford have created a bunch of diodes and plastic to rival Wall-E, Johnny 5 or C3PO. There's a warmth in the wires, a charm in the circuits that allows Frank to slowly bond with him over time - to the point they are able to start planning more heists.

Well, it's good mental exercise. Robot knows this.

It would have been easy for the film to somehow have become overshadowed by Robot, but such is the measured subtlety and depth of Langella's performance that never happens. At times frightened by a world he no longer understands, puzzled and scared by what he doesn't remember, at times devious, cunning and deceitful, Langella never allows the audience to do anything but care for what Frank is going through.

When he's arguing with his son (ably played by James Marsden) about not wanting the robot, you're on his side. When he's arguing with his daughter (Liv Tyler channelling her inner-hippy) about wanting the robot, you're on his side. Even though you know why he's doing it.

It is a performance that, in lesser hands, could have been clunky and cumbersome, but in Langella's is near-perfect.

The only other cast member of note is Susan Sarandon (time it right and you could see her in three films in one day right now), who as the librarian being windswept by advancing technology, and only other human Frank really talks to, is... well... 

Look, I like her. She's in some of my favourite films of all time. She's an assured screen presence. But not here. Now, the downbeat tone of the film (it's going to get called quirky a lot, I warn you) means she's not going to come in stealing the show. It's not her job to stamp her appearance on the screen. I get that. It just feels like she hasn't really got a handle on the role. Like she doesn't know how much to show. That's not to say she's bad, she's just doesn't quite gel with the rest of the film.

But that's the only real negative.

Langella and Robot steal this from everyone, but let's give full credit to Schreir here. Helming his first full-length feature, he could have gone for a more straightforward tale, but to his credit he steers the ship smoothly. There are light comic touches, there are heartwarming scenes, there's tense drama - he tackles the lot with aplomb.

If one was being picky (and hey, that's my job), it could be pointed out that a couple of the peripheral characters are not well-rounded enough to fulfil the bigger roles they are moved in to, and there are some inconsistencies in the storyline - but, really, at the end, I didn't care.

On the face of it, an old man and his robotic butler/carer shouldn't move you, shouldn't engage you this much - in the same way that, at first glance, a gawky kid trying to make it in a beauty pageant shouldn't wrap its arms around the world the way Little Miss Sunshine did.

But Robot And Frank does.

It's tender, it's heartwarming, it's delightfully odd, but the relationship carries you along in a warm blanket without smothering you with smushyness.

Unfortunately, in the screening I was in, the air conditioning must have been mucking about because at the end I seemed to have something in my eye...