The question is, does this one?
The poster for Sr. -- let's just call it Sr. until we get the issue of the quotation marks settled -- seems to indicate for sure that you are meant to include the quotation marks. It's a choice supported by Letterboxd and Wikipedia in listing this movie on their respective sites.
However, IMDB -- which some consider the be-all and end-all, definitive one-stop shop for movie information -- isn't having any of it. The title appears as just the two letters and the period.
Now, this could have a technical explanation. Since quotation marks in the titles of movies or other works of entertainment are extremely uncommon, it's possible that the use of quotation marks in IMDB allows for a more specific title search, an indication to look for only these two key words and not titles that are similar.
However, after testing this theory with a few searches bracketed by these punctuation marks, I've determined that IMDB appears to just ignore them as though they weren't even there.
Lower on the movie's IMDB page, it lists that it is also known as "Sr.," and in the featured user review, the quotation marks are also used.
While I am tempted to go with IMDB's implicit suggestion -- that it is stupid to have quotation marks in your title, even if that's how it appears in the film itself and in all promotional materials -- I may end up including the quotation marks in my own listing of the movie on my various lists.
Reason?
The title is otherwise so short and abrupt that it looks kind of like someone stopped halfway through typing it.
The quotation marks serve the function of saying "Yes, this is the full title, you aren't reading it wrong."
So I guess I will go with "Sr.," much as it offends me on some level. (And we're seeing one of the ways it offends me in this very sentence, where I am forced to include a comma that isn't part of the title within the rest of the title, in order to adhere to other basic grammatical rules, like the fact that you always put the comma to the left of the second quotation mark.)
While I've got you, I wanted to talk for a second about what it means to have "Sr." as part of your name.
With Robert Downey Sr., it made sense since the son went on to far outshine the father's accomplishments. While some lovers of independent cinema would certainly consider the father to be the more interesting contributor to the history of cinema, it's hard to argue that the man who earned worldwide recognition as Iron Man -- in fact, the actor probably most responsible for making the MCU what it is today -- is, in any meaningful way, the lesser Downey.
I checked on the internet and could not find an answer to when he actually took the "Sr." on as part of his name. It stands to reason, though, that it was not simply upon the birth of his son. His son had to gain enough renown, and he himself had to be confused for his son often enough, that the change was required.
But that's not the case with Travis Lakins Sr.
Travis Lakins Sr. is a baseball player. He's only 28 years old, so there is little chance that Travis Lakins Jr. has amounted to anything of note so far. Even with the most aggressive schedule for starting a family, and even assuming that Travis Jr. is the oldest of his three children (the internet is unclear on this), he could be no more than ten years old, and considering that he's not a child actor that I'm aware of it, it's unlikely anyone is talking about him outside of his relationship to his father, and possibly the fact that his existence prompted his father to add a clarifying suffix to his name.
Clearly most people who choose to name their children the same as them are not expecting to add this suffix to their name unless it's absolutely necessary for the sake of clarity. It indicates a certain pride in your offspring, which is sweet -- you are now defining yourself in relation to another person, rather than just them in relation to you. I'm not going to say it takes narcissism to give your son the same name as you -- I have friends who have done this and I don't consider them narcissistic at all -- but in some respects it does suggest you are making a miniature copy of yourself, which is something of a narcissistic impulse. Changing your own name to reflect the naming decision you've made for your child turns that possible narcissism on its head.
I do think it's interesting, though, that while the title "Jr." implies exactly one older person with that name on the family tree, "Sr." is not nearly so precise. Let's say that Robert Downey Jr. had named his son Robert Downey III. (He didn't; he named him Exton Elias Downey, a much more typically eccentric Hollywood child name.) Would Robert Downey Sr. still be a Sr. if there were a third Robert Downey, or would he just go back to being Robert Downey? I suppose at that point the "Sr." is a fixed part of his identity, which is kind of the point of naming this documentary the way it's been named.
What is it with famous Downeys naming their children after them, anyway? I was probably learning about Morton Downey Jr., the notorious television talk show host, around the same time I was first learning about Robert Downey Jr., and I'm sure I thought they were related. In fact, Morton Downey Jr. (son of the singer, Morton Downey) was only four years older than Robert Downey Sr., so he could have easily been Robert Downey Jr.'s father -- and I think at some point, I thought he was. According to the logic of the maybe 13-year-old me, "Downey Jr." was a complete last name. The father's first name was Morton while the son's first name was Robert.
The funny thing about this whole thing is that Robert Downey Sr. was actually a junior himself. His own father was born Robert Elias, and Downey Sr. was for a time Robert Elias Jr., until the father changed the whole family name as an easier way of getting into the military, if I'm remembering correctly what the film told me. (Something about the name Elias sounding too Jewish.) But wait then why wasn't he himself Robert Downey Jr.? I must be missing something here.
So at least Robert Downey Jr.'s son was named as a way of honoring the heritage of the family, if only as a middle name. (Which, incidentally, is how we handled it in my family, with both of my children having their mother's last name as a middle name.)
And I think that's about enough discussion of that.
Note: By using "sr." as a label on this post, I've manipulated Blogger into moving it to the top of my alphabetical list of labels, one ahead of the label for the movie (untitled).
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