If quirky and twee are not one’s cup of tea, “Brian and Charles” will be an endurance test. Making his feature film debut, director Jim Archer expands on the 2017 short he made that introduced, respectively, the titular man and his robot. A common problem that occurs when a full-length film derives from a short is a lack of enough plot material to justify its existence. The screenplay by David Earl and Chris Hayward (who play Brian and Charles) stretches this story beyond its breaking point. The decidedly lo-fi robot elements give the proceedings a bit of charm, as does the North Wales location, but they are not enough to save this buddy comedy from sapping the audience’s patience and goodwill.
Brian is a lonely man whose bouts of depression co-exist with his penchant for building strange inventions. One of these, a flying cuckoo clock built to look like one of those old-fashioned Wright Bros.-era planes, generates a big laugh when the inventor explains: “People will look up and see it’s half-past Brian!” (A bigger laugh occurs when the contraption bursts into flames.) Brian also makes pine-cone pocketbooks, which are just handbags with pine cones glued all over them. His inspiration comes from the items he finds in various scrap heaps and dumps. It’s safe to say he’s no Thomas Alva Edison, but he shares Edison’s philosophy. As the more successful inventor once said, “to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
One day, Brian finds a mannequin head and is immediately inspired to make a robot companion. It has arms and legs, and a torso made out of a washing machine. Since a naked male robot might invalidate the film’s PG rating, Brian gives him trousers and a very large dress shirt. Befitting a proper English gentleman, he is also given a large bow tie. After a failed attempt to start him up, the robot suddenly springs to life. He learns English by reading the entire dictionary and christens himself “Charles Petrescu.” “I am your friend,” he tells Brian. Pillow fights and games of darts ensue.
In the early scenes, Brian talks directly into the camera of what appears to be a documentary film crew. Why they are there is never explained, but it’s clear they are real because other characters interact with their cameras. Brian even chats with them on one occasion, and they respond. The sudden disappearance of this gimmick is equally inexplicable, though it hints at the film’s overall structural problems.
Buying Charles’s sentience does not require much suspension of belief. His love of eating only cabbages might be pushing things, though the digestive functions of a robot with a washing machine for a midsection may intrigue viewers as they wait for something of interest to happen. To supplement the thin plot, Archer and company introduce Hazel, a potential romantic interest for Brian. She’s played in a lovely performance by Louise Brealey from the BBC series, “Sherlock.” She gets a sweet series of scenes where the awkward silences between Hazel and Brian intrinsically grow into a courtship.
There’s also a gigantic bully of an antagonist named Eddie (Jamie Michie). He has a mean wife and two spoiled kids who sneer like the wicked stepsisters in the Disney cartoon “Cinderella.” Their stitched-on plotline becomes interminable when Eddie takes a sinister interest in Charles. The wacky way Brian combats the near-lethal violence Eddie inflicts on him also feels jarringly out of place, like someone bringing slapstick to a gunfight. What begins as a meditation on loneliness and finding companionship devolves into unwarranted conflicts.
More importantly, “Brian and Charles” is murky when it comes to the nature of the relationship between the two characters. At first, they appear to be best buds. Then Charles starts acting petulant, exhibiting signs of the average adolescent. Brian has to constantly chastise him, like a son. There’s more than one moment when it appears Hazel, Charles, and Brian will form an unconventional family unit, but that dynamic is never given more than cursory consideration. The oddball ending would have been been more satisfying had the relationship between the trio been more carefully defined.
★★
BRIAN AND CHARLES
Directed by Jim Archer. Written by David Earl and Chris Hayward. Starring David Earl, Chris Hayward, Louise Brealey, Jamie Michie, Lowri and Mari Izzard, and Lynn Hunter. At Boston theaters, suburbs. 90 minutes. Rated PG (one profanity, some violence. Cabbages were harmed in the making of this picture).