How do you finish a six-movie series with a theoretically unlimited number of viable options, when you've got just one left and your last movie could be almost anything?
A legendary flop is one way to go, but even one better than that, how about a movie legendary for bearing no relationship to the rest of the director's filmography, which he made in order to keep financing his weirder and more personal projects?
The funny thing is, when I read more about Francis Ford Coppola's 1996 film Jack on Wikipedia, there's no mention of the "one for them, one for me" mentality that we know drives someone like Steven Soderbergh. In fact, it looks like Jack may have been a "one for me" movie more than we ever thought, and not one of Coppola's "paycheck movies" (like The Rainmaker).
And also, it wasn't a flop -- it made $78 million on a $45 million budget.
And also, I did not hate it.
Yes friends, I'm giving Jack 3 stars out of 5.
When you come in negatively predisposed toward something, and you find it tolerable when you watch it, you feel even more positively toward it than if you'd had no expectations whatsoever. I suppose that's an obvious statement.
The problem with Jack is, it's a sentimental film, the sort that Robin Williams made one too many times. But it's nowhere near as mawkish as something like Patch Adams. And I found what it was trying to do touching enough, especially when I learned some of Coppola's motivations behind making it.
But first, some plot.
Williams plays the title character, who is born at a normal size and weight after only ten weeks of gestation in his mother's womb. This, we learn, is because Jack has a condition that makes him age at four times the rate of other people. I don't think this is a real condition.
So by the time he's ten years old, he can be played by Williams, who was actually 45 at the time, though Jack is supposed to look 40. It's just the kind of role you know Williams would want to play. He gets to act like a ten-year-old, and if there's one complaint I have about the film -- there's probably more than one -- it's that I thought Williams was acting a bit more like he was six than like he was ten. I have an 11-year-old, and just a year ago he didn't act like Williams does in this movie. Then again, that's got an explanation in the plot -- Jack has not been attending school because it was thought a person in his condition could not properly blend into a school environment, and fair enough.
But it's eventually decided with some encouragement from his tutor, played by Bill Cosby (!), that it might be a good idea for Jack to try this environment, and his attempts at socialization with the rest of the children make up the bulk of the movie -- with of course the specter hanging over his head that his accelerated growth means he likely won't live until he's 25.
There's a real warmth to Jack, in among the goofiness and the type of Williams performance that sometimes made us impatient with him. But really, it's not so much Williams' actual performance, but our wariness of what his performance might be, that puts us on guard. Although the performance is always on the verge of going the wrong direction, it never does, and it makes for an interesting exercise for an actor -- one Williams completes with charm and likeability.
The ultimate message of the film, that we have to live our lives as long as we get the chance to live them, is not nearly as heavy handed as it could have been, either. The movie is schmaltzy in parts, but never as much as you fear it will be, and never even really enough to fully annoy you.
The reason for this warmth is that this story actually really resonated with Coppola. Wikipedia describes his interest in the script as stemming from two things, both related to his children:
1) The character of Jack reminded him of his own son, Gio, to whom the film is dedicated and who died in childhood;
2) He wanted to make a movie that his daughter, Gia, could actually watch -- unlike, say, Apocalypse Now.
It was even a story with which he personally identified, since Coppola was sickened by polio in his youth.
And speaking of youth, there's a good reminder that this film isn't as different from the other films in Coppola's filmography as you would expect. Okay, I just read the plot synopsis of Youth Without Youth to remind myself what it was about, and it doesn't appear it's as close of a thematic match to Jack as you would think from that title. But I'll leave this paragraph in anyway.
Still, in his defense of Jack, Coppola said something that I found sort of interesting:
"It was considered that I had made Apocalypse Now and I'm like a Marty Scorsese type of director, and here I am making this dumb Disney film with Robin Williams. But I was always happy to do any type of film."
And I think the remainder of Coppola's career has really borne that out, often in ways that may have been true artistic failures, but represented this desire not to be pigeon-holed. I don't think Jack is a true artistic failure, it's just an example of the type of film that the right audience would find heartwarming, and the snob cinephile finds cloying. I guess that's why I don't think of myself as a snob cinephile, because hatred was not what I was feeling as I watched Jack.
Films involving the unusual growth of children have a bit of a tough row to hoe. For every The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there's three Simon Birches. Jack is more Birch than Button, but it's a lot closer to the middle of those two poles than you might think.
There are some other noteworthy things about the film. One of which is that it's one of Jennifer Lopez' first film roles. It was interesting to see her up there at all of age 27, playing Jack's teacher. She was about to really blow up with Out of Sight, but what is probably her actual breakthrough, Selena, was not until the following year.
Look I'm not going to go out recommending Jack to everyone I see. I do think, though, that if it had been directed by someone like Tom Shadyac or Chris Columbus, both of whom made sentimental films with Williams in the 1990s, it would have gotten less flak. It's just that no one could believe that this was the movie Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make as a follow-up to The Godfather Part III and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And while I adore BSD, which is in my top 100 on Flickchart, I have to say that Jack is waaaay better than Godfather Part III.
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