Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic in their design and with little, save for the director’s credit, to associate them with the latter’s pet themes and obsessions, these anomalies provide, at best, marginal room for the morbidly curious to indulge in their games of genealogy and psychoanalysis. Worse still is when the films appear as little more than genre bits of sappy generic slush, primed for cable TV and whatever the baseline threshold of zeitgeist consciousness is. In just this way, the legend of Francis Ford Coppola is consecrated: a series of decade-defining works is received by American audiences high and low, and the oddities of his smaller fare are glossed over, especially if not bolstered by tales of passion projects come undone by political correctness and fiscal orthodoxy.
Coppola’s 1996 film Jack, following the violent Romantic splendor of 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, settles for this sort of quiet romanticism. Its premise is lurid, to be sure; its machinations disarm our sensibilities of natural order as they do our expectations of narrative coherence. But it is not an incoherent film in the slightest. If anything, clumsy innocence may best account for its cringeworthy attempts to bring to life a premise almost certain to flounder under healthy skepticism. The titular Jack is a 10-year-old in a 40-year-old’s body: he will live the life of his body, age four times faster than the rest of his cohort, and die not long after his 20th birthday. The late Robin Williams plays Jack, a full-grown man who has to evince beneath his wrinkles and beard the totality of childhood fear and trauma. His parents hire a tutor (Bill Cosby) to get him up to speed for a world he will never really inhabit, but reluctantly let him attend public school to shake off his childish seclusion. Hilarity ensues.
Jack is maladjusted to life — both in the broad sense as well as in its elementary, teenage foibles. No particular cause underlines the propensity for his cells to divide and age as quickly as they do, and his parents Karen (Diane Lane) and Brian (Brian Kerwin) aren’t the promiscuous type to receive their just desert: an extreme premature birth in the tenth week. Nonetheless, Jack exists, and he soon develops a deep voice and facial hair, all these assortments of manhood. Without so much as a flash-forward from birth through the stages of his physical puberty, Coppola envisages the microcosm of his protagonist’s existential plight in an incongruent midlife crisis. As the preteen prepares to start school proper and make friends, he’s already dimly aware, if not of the creaking joints and aching bones, then of the certainty that they will outlast his youth the same way his would-be friends will outlive him.
Naturally, Jack isn’t quite the resounding tearjerker Coppola may have hoped. It’s hard for a man to get into the head of a boy, discounting effectively all that we expect the man to have already amassed and known. It’s easier to imagine precocity in a boy who’s many years beyond his age and already seen through the fragility of sentimental humanity. Sentimental humanity, however, is precisely the prism through which the film filters its weird, off-kilter scenarios. What would Jack do to fit in at school? Does he experience hormonal lust, as when his classmates acquire from him a raunchy Penthouse magazine, or true love, as when he asks his teacher (Jennifer Lopez) out to a dance? How exactly have his ten years on Earth prefigured the way he’ll see his next 10? These are all excellent questions, answers to which get short shrift under Coppola, whose picture-perfect harmony of perspectives — anxious parents, young children, bullied kids — aims to include snippets of everything but more resoundingly avows nothing.
But there is admittedly something endearing about Jack’s forlorn clumsiness. One could even read into things a little deeper than likely, namely how Jack’s emotional rather than physical puberty foregrounds the moral awakening of a modern self both closed off to wider reality and painfully aware of its mortality. This might be a stretch, especially when considering the film’s bungling execution of its several comedic tropes (one famously of Jack impersonating the school principal and flirting with his classmate’s mom). It’s worth considering, as a matter of hindsight, the strangeness of Coppola’s casting nearly 30 years after the fact. With Cosby, the myriad allegations of sexual assault against him do put a funny taste in the scenes where he mingles with Jack and his friends. But more strikingly, with Williams, a double whammy appears in the idea of a grown man playing a 10-year-old with facsimiled interiority as well as the outwardly cheerful but secretly depressed comedian starring in a film about life’s ephemeral joys. Irony has poisoned many a well, but with Jack it’s less an attack on its uncurbed sincerity and more a quietly resigned dismissal.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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