I'm Your Man

And Who Deserves Kindness

Welcome to Romance Week, and we’re going to be having quite the adventure within the human heart for the next five days. We’re starting with a pretty unconventional choice, because “I’m Your Man” has a lot worth discussing as far as relationships. In this German film, Maren Eggert stars as a museum curator who finds herself finding love in an unusual place – she’s fallen for a robot.

She is selected to be a type of case subject in order to explore and discover a new type of humanoid robot made for companionship. Of course, she is entirely non-receptive to meeting someone new, so she scoffs at the idea she might get close to a collection of nuts and bolts. Upon meeting the handsome prototype, she’s already instructing the creation to strikethrough certain affectionate words in his vocabulary. She’s immediately repulsed by this strikingly handsome bot, and yet she knows swallowing her pride and going through with the study will grant her funding for her yearslong research on ancient artifacts.

In an unusual touch, the robot is played by Dan Stevens. This is a small German film that asks sincere questions about love, free will and automation, and it stars the actor last seen in ridiculous 2024 fare as “Cuckoo”, “Kong X Godzilla: A New Empire” and “Abigail”. The guy speaks perfect German, who would have thought? The movie doesn’t have a special effects budget, so much of the “robot” theatrics have to be performed by him in-camera – notably the thought-processing and the slight malfunctions. He is creepily convincing!

I didn’t watch “Downton Abbey”, so I didn’t know much about Stevens until I ended up in prison. My first exposure was “Legion”, which I absolutely devoured – maybe the best “X-Men” media yet. Stevens struck me as classically handsome but more than a little offbeat, a leading man with a slice of ham. Perhaps the prototype for a Jim Carrey who could actually act. Not to knock Carrey – I watched Stevens do some broad pratfalls in the awful “Blithe Spirit” in prison, and clearly he couldn’t do what Jim pulled off in his prime. I do feel like Hollywood should have been working to make Stevens a leading man so he didn’t have to go play a robot in a German film. That being said, it doesn’t feel like Hollywood makes many leading men anymore anyway unless they can hoard them away inside a franchise.

Eggert finds herself completing morning-after meetings with a company employee (Sandra Hueller, “Anatomy Of A Fall”) who judges how real or artificial the experience has been. Of course, at one point this employee is speaking to one human and one humanoid robot respectively sitting next to each other. Eventually she’s addressing two pajama-clad individuals who just spent the night close to each other. Stevens’ robot is eager to please, romantic in small doses and sexy in others – but is he aware he’ll probably be shut down if Eggert doesn’t respond to his advances? The robotic companion is geared towards her happiness, but is it programmed to be aware of its own existence? Is he aware it’s Seduce Or Self-Destruct?

“I’m Your Man” asks novel questions about what a relationship actually is. It’s not long before Eggert melts in the arms of this handsome automaton. But very quickly her frustration grows as she realizes he lacks spontaneity. At one point, she softly berates him for being, in essence, perfect. She requests flaws that he can’t accommodate. Her character frets that automation will eliminate the struggles that make us human. In a modern world, we can program happiness, but should we?

There’s a scene late in the movie where she bumps into another participant in the experiment. He’s a pasty-faced, heavyset middle-aged man, and his robotic companion is a beautiful young woman. It is a pathetic sight, this faded old man clinging to a gorgeous woman seemingly decades his junior (and actually more). But he sincerely celebrates meeting this new person, finding pleasure and comfort at a late age. Lest anyone think of sex, he remarks that the key element of their relationship is kindness, and a character asks, doesn’t he deserve kindness? Which is one of the tougher questions of the movie: do we?

“Who deserves kindness” is the central question of my own prison stay as well. My answer, then and now, is everyone. Kindness will encourage people to make confident, selfless life decisions that steer them away from moral compromise. Being emboldened to be your best self is the best deterrence to recidivism. We need to understand that kindness can be met with hostility, but that doesn’t mean that kindness isn’t essential.

Of course, as an ex-con, I struggle with this. I spent years being told the federal government that I was just a number, not a name, not a person. I came out of prison questioning who I could be now, and if I ever deserved happiness. I recall feeling kindness on my birthday last year – I had friends to either side, and I had rented out an entire movie theater to watch “The Beekeeper”. Even when staff mistakenly allowed an elderly couple to wander into my theater, I greeted them warmly and told them to make themselves at home. I was satisfied, I was content. But I sat in that theater, as I sit everyone now, and I thought to myself, do I deserve this kindness? I tell myself that I do. But for myself and millions of ex-cons everywhere, it’s almost like a glitch in the matrix. We look around and feel that ultimately, the world is giving us a kindness we haven’t earned, we may never earn.