Moviegoers around the world continually chastise Hollywood filmmakers for their perceived lack of originality, and for the copious amounts of cinematic crap they produce.  I know; I’ve done it, too.  Yet every once in a while someone makes a movie like Robot & Frank which proves that originality and quality can still be found in Tinseltown.  And it is movies like this little gem which should be celebrated and appreciated — and watched — for if the good ones don’t make any money, that fact indicates to studios that viewers don’t care about originality or quality.

Robot & Frank is a good little movie, set in the “near future.”  Its scale is small and its story is intimate, yet it has universal ramifications regarding aging, memory loss, home health care, family relationships and the future of libraries.  On top of all that, it is a caper film!  With all that happening, it’s also a first-rate character study with a marvelous performance at its center by Frank Langella (as Frank).  The other half of the titular pair is the white robot, never given a name, and voiced by Peter Sarsgaard.  It is a very unusual domestic-care robot, given that Frank is able rather easily to persuade it to follow his lead into some morally questionable activity.

Jake Schreier’s film does what drama does best — focusing on a particular, specific story and letting the large, meaningful themes gradually reveal themselves as the story unfolds.  To be sure, it could have gone even further into the tangents it raises, or become a much grander discourse on any one of several different paths.  But in the end it returns to its central focus on Frank, which is the right call, for it is he who represents those who are getting older and losing touch with the active world.

For those who might think this is a downer of a movie, that conclusion would be, in my view, incorrect.  The dialogue is sharply written, with a couple of moments that were not just funny, but hilarious.  Schreier’s film is perhaps a little slow and maybe a little too gentle for its own good, yet it is remarkably canny about its characters and happily nostalgic for what in our culture is being lost as technology progresses. This isn’t a great film but it’s definitely one of my favorites of 2012, and I definitely plan on seeing it again.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  31 August 2012.