Jack

Francis Ford Coppola – 1996 – USA

For twenty years I’ve resisted watching this movie because I heard nothing but bad things about it and – being a huge admirer of Francis Ford Coppola, even during his journeyman years in the 80s and 90s – I was in no hurry to witness his artistic nadir.  I never liked Robin Williams much, furthermore, and I judged this movie as just one more lame vehicle for the manic man-boy routine that he wore thin in movie after movie.  Jack seems tailor-made for Williams, whether it was or not.  A couple gives birth to a child with a special affliction; he is physically aging at four times the normal human rate; meaning that by the time he’s 10 he will be exactly Robin Williams’ age.  I hated the premise when I heard it, recoiled at the ads when I saw them, and then gladly refused to see the film until now.  I really wish I could announce “I was wrong!”  Unfortunately, while it’s not as bad as I feared, it’s not a misunderstood masterpiece either.  I was delighted with the film’s buoyant and surreal prologue, highlighted by Diane Lane in a witch’s outfit leading a conga line at a Halloween party, followed by a screwball trip to the hospital by Lane and her friends still in costume.  Once Williams takes over the film, though, it’s straight to his relentless wacky-schmaltzy back-and-forth right through to the end credits.  Williams isn’t bad; I just don’t like him; and add to the mix the high-and-mighty rapist Dr. William H. Cosby, Jr. mugging it up in scenes he has no purpose in and the film has more than its share of intolerable moments.  Truthfully, I wouldn’t give it a second thought were it not for my respect for Coppola, and ultimately it is only of interest to me in terms of its relation to Coppola’s recurring themes of memory, time and perspective.  The Godfather, Part II (1974) alternates between two eras decades apart.  The journey into the jungle in Apocalypse Now (1979) is a symbolic trip backwards in time.  In Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), a concussion sends the heroine back to her teenage years.  Most of all, it’s Youth Without Youth (2007) that jumped to mind as I watched Jack.  They tell opposite stories; in the latter film, an elderly man, hit by lightning, magically reverses in age forty years and gets a second chance at life.  The difference between the two films is striking.  Jack was Coppola’s penultimate film prior to taking ten years off to recharge his batteries before embarking on a new phase of his career.  It feels every bit the work of a tired man at the end of his rope, finally sinking – after years of struggle – to phoning in a hack’s work for a paycheck.  Youth Without Youth, in contrast, is a vibrant, challenging, philosophical work; in many ways a young man’s film.  It can’t cancel out Jack, but it tilts the scale back into balance.