Robot and Frank -- CALL Discussion Group

Robot and Frank

directed by Jake Schreier

     In Cold Spring, “in the very near future,” Frank (Frank Langella) is a retired cat burglar. One of his few contacts with the outside world is a lonely librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon). His grown children are worried about his lost memory and his inability to look after himself. Rather than put him in a home, a “memory center,” his son Hunter (James Marsden) buys him a robot companion (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) programmed to care for him. This despite daughter Madison’s (Liv Tyler) confusion between disliking robots and her political opposition to enslaving them. First the man has to subvert the disciplinarian robot’s fixation with good health. Then the man and machine end up planning a heist together. Ostensibly for Jennifer, they steal the library’s rare Gustave Dore edition of Don Quixote. Their partnership is briefly interrupted when the do-gooder Madison insists on moving in, turns off the robot, and tries to serve its functions. She restores Frank’s Captain Crunch. Finally Frank persuades her to turn it back on. The team steals the posh jewelry from Jake (Jeremy Strong), who has bought the library to replace books with the new technology, “to re-imagine the library experience” and make it “retro-cool” with “augmented reality stuff.” The police computer identifies Frank as a main suspect, in view of his previous jail terms, but Frank evades their investigation and search for the loot. He saves himself by taking the robot’s advice and erasing its memory. The film ends with Frank in a home, enjoying a family picnic and saddened that he doesn’t have a personal robot as other inmates do.   

Questions

1. How is Don Quixote a central key to this film? Mr Darcy?
2. What genres does this film play with? The buddy heist? Sci-Fi? The odd couple?
3. Isn’t this also a great love story? A man forgets his wife but discovers he’s still drawn to her anyway. There’s a tragedy in the forgetting and another tragedy in the restirring of ardor. 
4. How does the opening scene -- where Frank burglarizes a home and safe that he didn’t realize were his own -- parallel and validate his climactic revelation about his wife?
5. What are the implications of the hero’s criminal past and its revivifying resurrection? “It would be a crime not do it.” How is this related to Madison’s ambivalence/confusion about robots and third-world poverty?
6. Over the end credits there is documentary footage of assisted-living robots already developed in our ”real” world. How does that affect our reading of the film?
7. What is the point of the central family’s names? Their surname is Weld. And “Cold Spring”? 
8. What current social or cultural trends does the film reflect upon or satirize?
9. “The very near future” is established by minor extrapolations from our present technology, e.g., see-thru cell phones, voice-announced phone calls, wall-TV phones,    the library robot, slightly grotesque hair and dress styles. Hunter’s Audi has a (robot-like?) remote opener/closer. Perhaps the most dramatic new technology is the single-passenger car we see early in Frank’s walk. What might it symbolize?
10. Why did Harry’s restaurant change into the Blush beauty bar? What’s the point of Frank stealing cat soaps?
11. The new library is doing away with books because it will be “about community.” Really?
12. What’s the irony in the man who has lost his memory erasing his machine friend and servant’s?

How do these dialogue lines open up the film?

1 --Hello, Frank. It is a pleasure to meet you. 

   --How do you know? 

2. Connection lost.
3.Did you steal a fizzy bath bomb, you son of a bitch?
4.I’m not familiar with that title.
5.We’re gonna clean up.... I want to go out clean.
6.Take what’s most valuable by the ounce.
7.You’re so square you’re practically avant-garde.
8.They’re selling the feel of security.