Movie Review: "Jack"

Jack Be Simple

By Rainey Wetnight

“It’s too soon! It’s too soon!” -Diane Lane as Karen Powell, “Jack’s” mother

It’s only fitting that an absurd fable about a ten-year-old boy in a forty-year-old-man’s (Robin Williams’) body begins with an entourage dressed as the cast of the Wizard of Oz in the delivery room. “Jack’s” mother (Diane Lane) is the Wicked Witch of the East with ruby slippers; his father (Brian Kerwin) is a tearful Tin Man. “Don’t rust up on me now!” Lane exults as her baby boy is born seven months early. It is, perhaps, the funniest line in the whole movie. Certainly, his condition isn’t meant to be funny, but pitiful.

So, what exactly is wrong with Jack? He doesn’t have progeria, as a doctor explains early-on in the film, which is “devastating to the child”. Rather, his cells mature at four times the normal human rate, but he’s otherwise healthy. Why being so different from his peers would not be devastating to him is just as much a mystery as his main trait, and indeed, Jack is viewed as a monster by some curious neighborhood kids. Nevertheless, he’s just as happy-go-lucky as any typical ten-year-old boy, and as distracted. His tutor, Mr. Woodruff (Bill Cosby) comes to Jack’s house every day to teach him, but Jack wants to go to regular school instead. “We’ve seen how people react,” his mother says in defense of keeping him at home, “and we don’t want Jack to have to face that.” What Jack must face, of course, is other people (kids and adults) looking at him like he’s a child molester instead of a child - or, in this case, a man with a child’s mind.

So he goes off to school. He wakes up late, in his blue print pajamas. His mom makes him a lunchbox. He has a rather dorky plaid shirt and a backpack that’s half a size too small for him. The only differences are that Jack has to shave and his dad tells him he can come home any time he wants to, a luxury that ordinary kids lack but often wish they had. His new fifth-grade teacher, Miss Marquez (Jennifer Lopez) is too gorgeous for her own good. Let’s face it - a romance between her and Jack would technically be pedophilia. Knowing this, she loops her arm through his and introduces him to the rest of her class just as if he were a child-sized new student. Unfortunately he’s not, and promptly tips over in his child-sized desk.

Such sophomoric hi-jinks are only the beginning of Jack’s journey through the world of middle school. His shoelaces come untied. He doesn’t realize that he can easily navigate the balance-beam ledge. The other kids laugh, point and stare. “He’s probably planning on kicking our butts or something,” one neighbor boy with glasses says. If only, but this is a kids’ movie, and Robin Williams can’t unleash Jack’s inner beast. Instead, he gets poked with a long stick by two snooty little girls and ignored by the basketball team. Will he have his revenge a la Carrie, or eventually win them over? Even a ten-year-old knows the outcome.

The trouble with this movie is not Robin Williams, or even director Francis Ford Coppola. It’s the inane plot, flat characterization, toilet humor, vapid dialogue, and utter lack of insight into Jack’s character - until he starts getting gray hair. By then, the poignant fear he feels at growing truly old is too little, too late.

What are we supposed to learn from Jack? Accept those who are different? Yes, but why couldn’t Coppola have directed a movie about a real person with a real disability instead? Live life to the fullest? Yes, but why couldn’t Robin Williams have learned that lesson as a forty-year-old man in mind and body? Jack’s graduation speech is supposed to sum everything up, but the entire movie Dead Poets Society does the exact same thing in a much better way over the course of its running time than this movie does. Jack is insulting on so many levels, and to so many kinds of people, that it’s a wonder it was ever made.

I’d like to close this review with a modified Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

Jack be simple, with such schtick,
Jack’s so dumb that it makes me sick.

The late, great Robin Williams deserved better for bringing out the wishful, wondering kid in all of us.

Robin Williams
1951-2014