Jack: A Ten-Year-Old Boy in a Forty-Year-Old Body Will Make You Cry

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

Wicked Witch of the East’s legs protruding from the Gale house in Oz. While Mrs. Powell is a loving mother and not a wicked witch, the image reminds the viewer that the Powell family is not in Kansas anymore (figuratively speaking).

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. 

A Time Paradox is Nothing but a Loop: Several Time Issues Within Looper

Within the movie Looper, there are several plays with time that come into effect not only for the story of the movie itself, but as a means of commentary on today’s society. The movie was released in 2012 and starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, and Emily Blunt. Looper is based around a crime organization 30 years into the future from when the movie takes place, which is 2044. The crime organization uses time travel as a means of getting rid of bodies from the future when it is otherwise impossible to do so by sending them back in time. The people that live 30 years in the past are called loopers, they kill the people sent back and make money in the process. When the organization in the movie no longer needs the looper, they send their loop back in time with a giant pay day, which closes the loop for the looper.

One of the first elements that I noticed in this movie is the constant view of a clock. Throughout the movie the main character, Joe, looks at a pocket watch that he carries. Whenever he is hired to kill someone, he is left a note at his place that reads 11:30. When this happens, he goes to his kill site and watches his clock. As soon as 11:30 hits his target appears and he kills them. This plays an important role in two different ways for Joe. The first is that it shows the significance of time for Joe. He only watches and cares about the time in reference to when he is supposed to kill someone. The second is that it shows when in his life things change, as his older self appears late coming through time, indicating to him that something is off. Within the same context, the older Joe also carries the same watch. For him though, it is a reminder that he is fighting for his future wife. He keeps a picture of her in the watch. Whenever older Joe looks at it, it’s not the time he is looking at but at his wife. This subtly shows the changes between young Joe and old Joe. Finally, there are often points in the movie where various characters make references to clocks or watches or time. One of the big ones that stood out to me was the crime boss in 2044, Abe. He makes a comment about how he saved Joe after Joe had tried stealing a watch from one of his stores in town. This reference, along with Abe’s constant looks at the clock throughout the movie, indicate an importance of time for the movie.

Within this movie, there is also commentary on the time in which it was made. One thing I noted was the fact that early on in the movie, Joe speaks as a third person narrator to tell the audience about TKs. TKs were people that were able to use telekinesis and he makes a subtle reference to when it was first discovered. He mentions that the world believed they would get superheroes, instead they got a bunch of assholes that could hover a quarter in the air. I found this reference important for two reasons. The very first one was the fact that superhero movies were just beginning to slam the movie market. The same year that this movie came out, The Avengers came out as well. Besides The Avengers, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Series was being released, the X-Men franchise was still going on, and Spider-Man was back into reboot. I felt that this was a direct comment on the superhero franchise gaining power. It was a nod that, in the future, superheroes wouldn’t matter and the most we would get, is indeed, a bunch of assholes. Same could be said for the Rain Maker. Up until the very end of the movie, it’s known that in the future the Rain Maker is a powerful being that uses his powers for evil. Another commentary saying that even if we had superpowers, they would be used in the wrong way. In this view, and looking at it from the scope of a post 9/11 movie, it’s interesting to note that the world was more a dystopia. Gangs ruled certain areas and many of the loopers found their way into the business because they weren’t “very forward thinkers.” In the case of Joe, both his young self and old self find themselves in the predicament they’re in due to trauma, which seems to be a common theme with the play of time. Older Joe is there because of the lost of his wife. Younger Joe is there because his parents gave him away instead of taking care of him.

Getting back into the discussion of temporality itself in the movie, one of the big things that was at place was the idea of a time loop itself, or a time paradox. Within 30 minutes of the movie, the directors do a great job of trying to show the audience, and possibly even shove it down your throats a bit, that the movie is one giant loop up until the end. We get this idea right away with the quick montage scene with young Joe in the beginning. After the first time we see him kill a man, he cashes in his money, gets high on drugs, and parties through the night. After that, the director’s throw in a montage of the same things over and over again. Show Joe looking at his watch which shows 11:30, kill a man, go to a diner, get drugs, party. Rinse and repeat. It isn’t until his friend Seth’s older self escapes from Seth that the story changes and leaves the loop, but only for a short time. From there, we go to when Joe has to kill his loop and fails. The scene plays through, with Joe eventually falling and becoming unconscious. From there, we see a new scene play out, where Joe’s loop comes back in time and doesn’t escape and Joe kills him. It then plays out the rest of Joe’s life up until the present moment where young Joe is unconscious. From here the audience is left to understand that they are in a loop, or time paradox. The writers of the movie even take the time to have Joe explain the idea of a paradox at the end for those who don’t understand.

There was another aspect of the movie that also seemed to resonate with me in the idea of time, which is simply known as the butterfly effect. There aren’t a ton of things that happen to show this instance happening constantly, but enough to make the viewer realize that there is a cause and effect with time travel. One of the first is with Seth and his older self. After Joe sells out Seth, they begin to torture Seth and cutting off limbs before killing him. As this happens, Seth’s older self begins to mutate and become an amputee. This helps to prompt the viewers to know that whatever happens to the young version of a looper will affect the older version of the Looper. This idea then plays out with both versions of Joe. He carves into his arm to get his older version to meet him in a destination. His younger self gets part of his ear shot off, the older version has an disfigured ear. What was interesting to me was one small moment that they had later on the movie. Older Joe tells the younger version of himself that him and his wife would be unable to have children. Later on, after older Joe kills a child that turns out to not be the Rain Maker, he stumbles into a park and begins to cry. As he does, he has a flashback to his time with his wife. In this new flash back they are lying in bed and they can hear the cries of an infant and they smile. This indicates that the butterfly effect extends beyond just what happens to the looper.

This movie, despite a few critics saying that it ripped off other science fiction movies based around time, played with several key elements that are found in many narratives dealing with time and time travel. It hints at the importance of time itself. It gives social commentary about our current society. In a deals with potential trauma as a post 9/11 movie. It deals with the idea of a time paradox developing with the play of time travel. Finally, it also goes into the theory of the butterfly effect and the problems it can place on the future.