Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1996 CM Media, Inc.
Jack (1996)
Even now, when I see ads for “Jack” that say “directed by Francis Ford Coppola,” I get a little punch-in-the-gut feeling. This is the guy who gave us “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Rumble Fish” and “The Cotton Club” and “The Conversation.”
Now Disney’s just using him as a stirring stick to mix their sickening sweetener into the bitter coffee of life. Before our eyes he’s melting into the Coppola of “One from the Heart” and “Peggy Sue Got Married,” fading Cheshire-cat style into a wan smile with sugar-rotted teeth.
Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. Despite a reputation for hairy-chested violence, Coppola’s always been something of a mush-head.
Pairing him with Robin Williams, king of the touchy-feely, I’ll-suck-my-own-toes-if-it’ll-make-you-love-me sad sacks, really brings out the tendency. That’s why this film slowly turned my punch-in-the-gut feeling into total nausea.
It lets Williams wear more tread off his standard lost-innocent character, who this time is a 10-year-old boy (Jack) with a disease that makes him age four times faster than normal. Call it “The World According to AARP.”
This dopey premise results in a particularly bald example of the typical Disney-film struggle between gushy feel-good fantasy and hard-edged real-world consequences.
On the “Hakuna Matata” side, Jack’s dad is a high-fashion photographer who can keep his kid and full-time housewife in a palatial Victorian mansion. Jack’s fictional disease isn’t even played seriously (at first), presented as the hokey gimmick it is by funny-faced doctors.
Jack himself, despite being pumped full of an adult’s hormones, is sexually innocent instead of a rape monster, and despite growing so quickly has no coordination problems that leave him accidentally maiming his little playmates.
He’s not
even a real kid, actually, but rather a fantasy archetype of childhood itself,
as modern
On the “even Walt Disney died screaming and now rots in a tomb” side, Jack’s disease forces him to confront mortality at an early age. After a bad day at school, he suffers stress-related angina and falls down some stairs, saying, “Oh, it hurts, it hurts.” And, assigned an essay on his future plans, he says, “What do I want to be when I grow up? Alive!”
I broke up with laughter at these scenes; in fact, I’m nearly crying with laughter right now writing about them. Same goes for a scene where he goes to a seedy bar and gets tongue-kissed by Fran “The Nanny” Drescher, still doing her old-as-vaudeville-itself tart shtick.
I’m not laughing at human pain—there isn’t an ounce of humanity in these scenes. I simply get sadistic pleasure out of watching two-faced, manipulative films like this try to milk poignancy out of their own essential creepiness, shallowness and idiocy.
If you tried to do to people what this film tries to do to its audience, you’d be jailed for fraud, coercion and creating a public eyesore. To swallow its extravagantly stupid take on carpe diem philosophy, you’d need a throat the size of the Holland Tunnel.
Coppola, naturally, makes this a slick production with a true concern for details and finesse. But in the end, he commits the greatest of all sins: He pretends to be dumber than he really is. Way dumber.
He plays the “comedy” part as a total hard sell, with the forced effusiveness of a salesman who doesn’t believe in his own product. A bunch of fart jokes amid colorful sets does not a comedy make.
For dirt-cheap symbolism, Coppola provides a short-lived butterfly that flutters in to visit Jack at touching moments. On the plus side, it doesn’t break into song.
Then there’s Bill Cosby, making a rare film appearance as a tutor who tells Jack to remember the important things in life (like Jell-O brand gelatin, I guess). In another brilliant metaphor, he says Jack is like a shooting star, which are “very rare.” (“Rare” to the tune of thousands, if not millions, a year—time to get a new tutor, I’d say.)
In the
final moments, Jack (who’s wise because he’s sick, you know) admonishes his
friends to “make your life spectacular!” As this proves, spectacle’s
easy. How about meaningful, you soppy
twit?