Monday Movies Needs Him. He’s Our Friend.

Robot and Frank opens with a sequence borrowed from Bottle Rocket: a robber breaking and entering into his own home. But unlike Owen Wilson’s Dignan, whose crime is in preparation for a more eventful life, Frank (Frank Langella) is helplessly reliving his adventures. Frank lives in Cold Spring, NY, five hours’ round trip from his barely-not-estranged son Hunter (James Marsden), and under the lengthening shadow of dementia. When Hunter brings him a helper robot, an affably clunky-looking white cartoon astronaut without a name (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, inhabited by dancer Rachael Ma), he proudly resists at first, but soon learns that the robot’s obedience to federal and state law is subordinate to its prime directive, to maintain his health, and if planning and executing heists keeps his mind sharp and his life purposeful, the robot is happy to learn the meaning of “case the joint.”

Sad, sweet and hilarious, the movie takes turns a potential treacle sandwich into a perceptive meditation of aging, right action, and what “the near future” holds for humans. The set design is impeccable — Susan Sarandon, as a librarian who befriends Frank, drives a beat-up Prius, and Frank’s youthful antagonist wears hideous eyeglasses that look like mine from about 1994, a retro that has not yet become chic but probably will soon. The most beautiful motif is the question of whether Frank will keep himself out of trouble by wiping the robot’s memory; it would in one gesture destroy the evidence of his trespasses, but would assault the robot where Frank himself feels most assaulted.

I grew bored with the sequences in Iron Man that squeezed humor out of Robert Downey riffing with his CGI butler robot, but I loved Robot & Frank‘s long stretches of Langella doing the same thing with the robot, more quietly and with higher stakes. It seems odd that a helper robot would have a male voice, but Sarsgaard sells it with his vaguely femme-y trademark supervillain purr. As Frank’s daughter, Liv Tyler is a hippie globetrotter who opposes the robot on “human movement” grounds but can’t keep his house marginally livable when she powers it down; she might have been more interesting if her character’s outrage was less Luddite and more concerned with labor displacement, but that’s a minor beef.

Brave – It’s mythic Scotland, and the clans are gathered, each vouching a suitor for the hand of King Fergus and Queen Elinor’s daughter Merida (Kelly Macdonald).