Man nurses machine
Quirky Brit buddy movie with a twist of AI is both charming and annoying
Brian and Charles is a 12-minute short from 2017, directed by Jim Archer and written by its two stars, David Earl (Brian), and Chris Hayward (Charles). In it, a crackpot British inventor crafts a robot out of a washing machine, a mannequin head, some oversized clothes and gumption.
The robot names itself Charles Petrescu.
Brian and Charles is also a 90-minute movie that debuted at Sundance this year. The plot, cast and crew are the same, though the expanded version now includes Louise Brealey as love interest Hazel, and James Michie as Eddie, local bully in the small Welsh town where Brian lives.
It all amounts to a bit of a single note, though admittedly that note is a sweet one. Brian, shy and awkward to a fault, begins by showing viewers around his home and demonstrating some of his previous inventions. (Imagine the drabbest episode ever of MTV Cribs, all fog, knitwear and cabbages.)
When he creates Charles, the mechanoid is at first unresponsive, but seems to be sparked to life and sentience by a bolt of lightning, a.k.a. the Johnny 5 method.
We then get to watch the two muck about together, with the moody robot sometimes behaving like a dog (happy to see Brian but tending to make a mess), sometimes like a surly teenager, and occasionally like a philosopher, as when he asks his creator: “How far does the outside go?” Brian, not much of a conversationalist, has a tendency to parrot whatever Charles says, which does get a little tiresome.
Brian and Charles joins the list of lighthearted man-and-machine movies that includes Steve Guttenberg in Short Circuit, Frank Langella in Robot & Frank, Hugh Jackman in Real Steel, and Tom Hanks in Finch. Not anyone's finest hour — OK, Robot & Frank was actually pretty good — and Brian and Charles is similarly mild fun in its own quirky British fashion.
If it doesn't annoy you in the first 12 minutes, it'll charm you for the remaining 78.