The movie Jack directed by
Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robin Williams in the title role was released
in 1996, eight years after the release of Big starring Tom Hanks. Both movies deal
with a young male protagonist who physically ages beyond his chronological age;
however, while Josh Baskin in Big
wishes to become older and magically ages twenty years overnight, Jack Powell
in Jack is born with a medical
condition that physically ages him four times faster than his chronological
age. Big explores the desire to be
older coupled with the belief that better times will occur at the next age
milestone; Jack explores how to
appreciate life since no one really knows how long he or she has to life it to
the fullest.
Jack opens with Mr. Powell and a
barely-showing pregnant Mrs. Powell attending an adult-version Halloween party.
As the conga line circles the dance floor, Mrs. Powell’s belly looks more
pregnant with each lap until she goes into labor suddenly pregnant with a
full-term baby boy. The film cutely acknowledges the leap from reality to
fantasy through Mrs. Powell’s costume: with her feet in the stirrups, Mrs.
Powell is only visible from the knees down wearing striped stockings and red
glittered high heels, much like the
After much testing, the doctors announce
that infant Jack is perfectly healthy but growing at a rate four times faster
than normal. Any viewer not willing to suspend disbelief at this point should
stop watching. Although Roger Ebert dismisses the medical condition as fiction and
Owen Gleiberman describes the condition as “mysterious,” the trivia page
on IMDB suggests that the condition was inspired by Werner Syndrome
that is characterized by “unusually accelerated aging (progeria) [. . . and] is
typically recognized by the third or fourth decades of life, [but] certain
characteristic findings are present beginning during adolescence and early
adulthood.”
As Roger Ebert points out, “Jack brings [. . .] poignancy, because
the situation isn't caused by magic, but by medical reasons; it's obvious Jack
may not turn 20.” Every mother watching can relate to Mrs. Powell’s decision to
keep Jack home from school, to protect him from any teasing, and to keep him
with her at all times so that she can cherish their time together. The film
jumps forward ten years; Jack has a tutor (played by Bill Cosby) and all his
free time is spent with his parents. Mom plays hide-and-seek and laser gun wars
with Jack, which is an interesting visual as the forty-year-old body of a
ten-year-old son plays rough-and-tumble games with his thirty-two-year-old
mother who is trying to act like a ten-year-old boy. Obviously, Robin Williams
is in his element in this role; he is the perfect choice for a ten-year-old
trapped in an older body. Eventually, all the men—Jack, Dad, and the tutor—convince
Mom that it’s time for Jack to attend public school. Jack attends Nathaniel
Hawthorne Elementary School, which could be a wink to the English majors in the
audience who should know that Hawthorne wrote the short story “Dr. Heidegger’s
Experiment” about a group of elderly adults who are given water from the fountain
of youth and de-age. As shown in the trailer
linked in the opening line, Jack’s first day of school is fraught with
slapstick hijinks, such as a forty-year-old body not fitting in a desk designed
for a fifth grader, and the requisite sideways glances and teasing on the
playground. A few days later, Jack proves his worth as the tallest kid during a
game of basketball during recess; suddenly everyone sees Jack’s duality as a
positive.
The movie coasts through the fun times:
Jack becoming best friends with Louie and the other neighborhood boys; the gang
hanging out in a treehouse having farting contests, and the ultimate reason to
have a friend who looks forty, Jack buying Penthouse
for the guys. The second treehouse scene, in which the gang invites the one
adult that they trust to be kidlike, Jack’s tutor Mr. Woodruff. While having a raucously
good time (that is best viewed),
with Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush
playing on the television in the background, the treehouse begins to shake and
crack. The final weight that causes the treehouse to collapse is a butterfly
landing on the windowsill, hence the butterfly
effect (a seemingly inconsequential event has far-reaching or long-lasting
effects). Another wink at those audience members who recognize this reference.
The duality, however, also causes
internal conflict for Jack. As his classmates share their “What I Want to be
When I Grow Up” essays, Jack grasps that his time is running out; one girl
states that she wants to get married at age twenty-eight; Jack does the
calculation and realizes that his body would be 112 years old when his
chronological age would be twenty-eight. Since having a forty-year-old body
makes it difficult to ask a ten-year-old girl to the dance, Jack turns to his sympathetic
fifth-grade teacher (played by Jennifer Lopez) as a potential love interest in
an attempt at normalcy. Jack explains to Miss Marquez that “you look just like
me.” Unfortunately, Jack has
misconstrued her attempts to help him fit in, and her rejection is particularly
stinging. To make matters worse, as Jack flees the classroom, the rapid aging
process catches up to him causing an attack of angina that lands him in the
emergency room.
After being told by the doctor that Jack’s
internal clock is running out of time, Mrs. Powell unilaterally decides that
Jack should stop attending school. In an act of rebellion, Jack uses his
premature aging to his benefit for the first time; he sneaks out of the house
and goes to the bar where Louie’s single mother hangs out. He first copies the
other lonely single men at the bar by drowning his sorrows with alcohol; after Louie’s
mom arrives, he copies the other men on the dance floor in an attempt to act
like an adult. Unfortunately, the alcohol and the unfamiliarity with adult
behavior results in a bar fight between Jack and a man he keeps bumping into.
Jack is arrested and then bailed out by Louie’s mom, but Jack has decided that his
mother was right, after all, and he chooses to stay out of school.
Every classmate, even the bullies, tries
over time to convince Jack to return, but Jack chooses self-pity and wallowing.
Mr. Woodruff returns to tutor but quickly decides to leave because Jack is not
interested in education and, as a result, nor of living. Mr. Woodruff leaves
Jack with this thought: “Do you know why I like to teach children? Because they
don’t get so revved up in being an adult, so I can remember there are other
things important in life, like riding a bike or playing in a treehouse.” Jack’s
aging has reminded the adults around him how to enjoy being young-at-heart. Mr.
Woodruff then compares Jack to a shooting star: a shooting star “passes
quickly, but while it’s here it lights up the whole sky.” The advice from Mr.
Woodruff is just as effective as all advice from Dr. Huxtable in The Cosby Show; Jack returns to school
in time to hear that Louie wants to grow up to be just like his best friend Jack
because Jack is “the perfect grown-up—inside, he’s just a kid.” Jack gives the normal
ten-year-olds a role model to become an adult who doesn’t forget what it means
to be a kid.
But Louie’s speech is only the beginning
of the viewers’ tears. The film then jumps forward seven years to high school graduation.
The eighteen-year-old Jack in the seventy-two-year-old body is the class
valedictorian. His speech is straightforward and short because his time is
short. It’s better for you to hear it
than to read it, but his final advice is to “make your lives spectacular—I know
I did.”
The movie always makes me cry; I would
have been the mother of a two-year-old when Jack
was released, but the movie doesn’t tug any less on my heart strings twenty
years later now that I am the mother of two sons, almost twenty-two-years old
and almost nineteen-years old. I want them to have both long lives and
spectacular lives. When rewatching the movie, I tend to avoid the section of
the movie that follows Jack when he is struggling with the duality of his
condition probably because it is awkward and uncomfortable; I am able to
suspend my disbelief and sympathize with this ten-year-old who just wants to
fit in somewhere but cannot. Gleiberman describes the movie as “a syrupy comedy,”
while Ebert observes that the movie “only wants to pluck the usual heartstrings
and provide the anticipated payoff.” Janet Maslin states that “Jack has the egregious earmarks of a
tritely inspirational story.”
However, this oversentimentality can be
explained by the dedication that follows the main cast credits at the end of
the movie: “For Gia, ‘When you see a shooting star. . .’” Gia is Coppola’s
granddaughter and the daughter of Coppola’s late son. The wishful thinking, “If
only we knew when our lives would end,” or “If we only had more than enough
time” is suddenly understood. The movie Jack
was made more the result of personal emotion than a carefully crafted concept.
Ebert’s poignancy is not just that Jack may not live to see twenty but that
none of us really knows, and that uncertainty is the part of time that is
hardest to face.
Ebert, Roger. “Jack Movie Review
& Film Summary” Roger Ebert. Ebert Digital LLC, 9 Aug.
1996.
Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
Gleiberman, Owen. “Jack Review.” Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly, Inc. 9, Aug.
1996.
Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
Maslin, Janet. “Jack (1996): A Body That Grows Up Before Its Owner Does.” The New York
Times. The New York Times
Company. 9 Aug. 1996. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
“Werner Syndrome.” NORD (National
Organization for Rare Disorders). National Organization
for
Rare Disorders. n.d. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.
