There’s a telling moment early in Finch, director Miguel Sapochnik’s small-scaled, sentimental, post-apocalyptic road picture (I know, another one of those, right?) when robotics engineer Finch Weinberg returns from his latest scavenger hunt for food and supplies, removes his radiation suit and opens the day’s top catch: a can of dog food. Will Finch, dying of radiation poisoning on a desiccated, ravaged, near-future Earth stripped of all vegetation, eat the dog food himself? Perish the thought. Instead, Finch gives the food to his dog, Goodyear, who no doubt appreciates that his owner is played by Tom Hanks, whose innate integrity and universal appeal demand that the dog’s survival is more important than his own. Whatever disappointment comes from not seeing the two-time Oscar winner go full Max Rockatansky will dissipate as the film develops into something altogether unexpected: a rather sweet and engaging dystopian coming of age story with puppy dog eyes that willfully avoids all the surprise, suspense and danger expected of the genre and then defies you to be cold-hearted enough to reject it. In the end, one gently succumbs to this film of modest charms whose risks lie in playing it safe.
In the pantheon of films featuring only one flesh-and-blood on-screen character, Finch isn’t quite the same as Robert Redford going from boat to raft to heavenly chariot all by his lonesome in J.C. Chador’s All is Lost (2013), Ryan Reynolds living and dying in a coffin in Buried (2010) or Tom Hardy tooling around in a BMW X5 for 85 unaccompanied minutes in 2013’s mesmerizing Locke. Finch contains limited characters much like last year’s Midnight Sun and 2007’s I Am Legend. Like those films, Finch knows where its bread is buttered and that’s with one of the only movie stars our culture has managed to continue embracing. At the outset, Hanks has Goodyear to keep him company along with a squat, WALL-E-esque robotic companion named Dewey, whose name may be a nod to one of the three greenhouse-tending robots in Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 sci-fi eco-missive, Silent Running. Dewey is merely on-hand to help Finch forage for supplies, since the warm, comforting smile of America’s Dad suggests there’s nothing truly terrifying lurking in the dark; no Omega Man light-averse mutants or giant scorpions from 1977’s Damnation Alley that’ll require Hanks to throw haymakers, pick up a flamethrower or fire the pistol he flashes in one brief shot, suggesting that even Checkov’s Gun didn’t survive the apocalypse.
There is, however, the prickly matter of him coughing up blood so Finch creates a more advanced robot whose purpose is to care for Goodyear after he dies. The robot has been uploaded with the contents of dozens of books, including ones about dog care and, since there’s no nail in Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script that can’t be hit too strongly on the head, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. A jerry-rigged creature with a rust-colored, rectangular head and a steampunk body, the robot stands upright and looks like it was designed by New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan. It’s been programmed with Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, along with a fourth law, which is to protect Goodyear in the absence of Finch.
To further underscore the point that the robot is meant to be Finch’s surrogate child, Finch teaches him how to walk, scolds him when he does wrong, instills in him the value of trust and teaches him how to drive, all with the ultimate goal of sending him off to college (correction: training him to care for a dog on a planet that has becomes an uninhabitable wasteland since a solar flair fried the ozone layer). The robot even christens itself with the rather unrobotic name of Jeff (after Finch rejects William Shakespeare and Napoleon Bonaparte) and is gifted with the voice and expert mo-cap movements of this generation’s Crispin Glover, the actor Caleb Landry Jones. His voice work allows Jeff to gradually go from confused and searching youngster to wiser and more self-assured teen. He’s robotic without being emotionless and childlike without being cloying. In physical gestures both subtle and broad, he conveys Jeff’s rapt attentiveness to his human father, his joy in discovery (Jeff seems particularly enthusiastic about popping popcorn) and his increasing confidence in his ever-more humanlike movements.
Jeff’s accelerated maturity will be crucial when an approaching superstorm forces him, Finch, Goodyear and Dewey to abandon their St. Louis hideout, even with only 72% of his knowledge base uploaded to his brain. Hitting the road in Finch’s solar-powered RV, they drive towards San Francisco assiduously avoiding any sense of excitement, urgency or peril. Even the ominous car that follows them in the dead of night around Denver suddenly disappears, as if the movie was threatening to become too intense and a re-set was needed. And yet, with Hanks at the wheel, one is willing to set aside genre expectations and accept the story for what it is and appreciate the unique environment in which it’s told.
The film is tailor-made for what Hanks has embodied across the long arc of his career: he’s been a savoir (Sully), a man of forthright intentions (Saving Private Ryan), a lone survivor (Cast Away) and, most importantly, he’s good with dogs (Turner and Hooch). Finch is a combination of all these attributes yet Finch is not a heavy thematic lift. It’s a fairly simple and affecting tale of a weary, dying Geppetto teaching his creation how to survive without him (a role Hanks will duplicate when he actually plays Geppetto in Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming Disney adaptation of Pinocchio). Considering his sitcom beginnings, Hanks quickly aged into a very effective underplayer of dialogue. Here, Finch spins middle-distance remembrances of his past that includes an abandoned father and his tragic first meeting with Goodyear. Indeed, the entire film is underplayed in a way that surely convinced Universal to ditch its originally-intended theatrical release and pawn it off on AppleTV+. While some would consider this a sign of the film’s creative failure, it’s actually better for the movie. Finch is a modest drama writ on a huge canvas usually reserved for rampaging villains and eat-my-irradiated-dust chase scenes. It’s a disconnect that director Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) embraces and even if some (OK, many) of his choices veer towards the obvious (Note to Emmy-winner Sapochnik: Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere should only be used ironically or comedically) Finch works as much for what it isn’t than for what it is.