Cinema
Jack
(PG, selected cinemas)
Grow up, Robin
Mark Steyn
Jack is one of that select group of films so ghastly they're mesmerising. It's directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who once would have known better; it stars Robin Williams, who never has.
Ever since Mork and Mindy 20 years ago, Williams has been a novelty turn who requires the veneer of narrative. Because his turn is essentially a childish one — a gift for manic look-at-me mimicry — it's proved harder and harder, as he's crept into middle age, to find satisfactory vehi- cles for him. Mrs Doubtfire was bizarre enough: a divorced dad who, in order to spend more time with his kids, dresses up as a woman and poses as their nanny. But Jack is even more contrived: the epony- mous hero is a boy with a rare ailment he ages at four times the normal human rate, so that, at the age of ten, he looks 40. If you're thinking, 'My goodness, that must be a very/ rare ailment. I've never heard of it,' relax: a couple of canny film school stu- dents from New York University, James DeMonaco and Gary Nadeau, cooked it up specifically with Williams in mind. Some- times, though, a premise can be too neat: after all, what's new about seeing Williams playing an overgrown child? To one degree or another, that's what he's done in every- thing from Mork to Good Morning, Vietnam. What would be novel would be to see him convincingly be grown-up: when he tries, as he did in Steven Spielberg's Hook, he becomes pious and maudlin.
Anyway, the one joke in Jack is that Williams is a little boy in a 40-year-old's body. Thus, when a curvy mom played by Fran Drescher mistakes him for an avail- able man, he responds by wiggling his fists inside his shirt in imitation of her striking breasts. The director Adrian Lyne, who's been given a hard time in the American media over his remake of Lolita, must be wondering how he got it so wrong: if you make a serious film about precocious little- girl sexuality, you must be sick; but, if you make a creepy film about pre-adolescent little-boy sexuality, it's supposed to be cute. Still, once you accept that this is the only gag the film's got going for it, you become fascinated by just how creepy Williams can be. For example, his parents are just about to have sex when Williams comes bounding in like Tigger, clutching a teddy bear, demanding to spend the night in their bed, and then dives head first between them. Later, we see some of the little girls at school poring over the hair on his arms. It's one of the peculiarities of this film that the more Williams tries to be winsome and loveable to us the more the real children in the picture seem determined to be wholly charmless and graceless.
Having decided that the sole joke — the oversized child — must be served at all costs, Coppola dispenses with the most basic narrative plausibility. After some pri- vate tuition from Bill Cosby, young Jack is sent to elementary school: thereafter, we see him again and again squeezing in and out of a fifth-grader's school desk. In most American school districts, it's safe to say, even the most obtuse teacher would quick- ly manage to arrange some less humiliating seating. But not here. Jack is yet another example of one of the worst trends in movies in recent years: comedy, which was once the most disciplined of dramatic structures, has dwindled away to a series of essentially disconnected squibs.
But worse is to come. Being a Robin Williams film, it must have a message, and the message is duly delivered in a speech by Jack as his school's prematurely aged valedictorian. He is aware of his mortality now and so he tells his classmates not to judge the value of a life by how long it lasts but instead — wait for it — live for today. His parents are profoundly moved, as they can afford to be: they've now produced a bonnie baby daughter who's perfectly nor- mal.
It's hard to see this as anything other than a lightly disguised metaphor for Aids, to whose accelerated physical decline Jack's amazingly rare condition has a superficial resemblance. It would have taken a small amount of celluloid courage to deliver such a speech in, say, The Bird- cage. But, shoehorned into the finale of Jack, it seems glib and parasitic. Where the hero of Jack goes through accelerated age- ing, Williams seems to be becoming pro- gressively more and more immature: he dresses up as a woman to give us a riff on the casualties of divorce; he pretends to be a ten-year-old boy to warn us to be nicer to Aids victims. What next? Williams as a foe- tus who discovers a cure for cancer?
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