A Life Through Film #028: Jack
A legendary director and certifiable star totally whiff with this stinker
Release Date: 8/9/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Film Twitter, a term for the vague coalition of Letterboxd users and aspiring Eberts on the site now unfortunately known as X, had its collective eyes on one new film earlier this year, and for some reason it wasn’t Hundreds of Beavers [I’ve watched it three times in the last month and a half. 4.5/5]. Instead, the buzz was centered around Megalopolis, the bizarre sci-fi (?) parable (?) from legendary director Francis Ford Coppola.
The movie was touted as the pure, unadulterated vision of one of the greatest visionaries in the history of film, but more importantly, it was also supposed to be batshit insane. Each consecutive trailer muddied our perception of what the movie actually was. Its absurdly stacked cast play characters named Wow Platinum and Constance Crassus Catilina. At its prestigious festival screenings, there was a live theater component where an actor would go up to a microphone stand and talk to star Adam Driver on the screen.
A movie doesn’t always have to be good to be worth seeing. It merely has to be compelling, and many online film buffs found themselves compelled both earnestly and ironically. But when it finally came out, Megalopolis ended up not making much money at all at the box office, probably because it’s not supposed to be all that enjoyable. As many were quick to point out on my feed, the movie being good wasn’t the point. It was enough that a mind such as Coppola’s was able to self-finance an ambitious project like Megalopolis and put his unfettered creative ideas out in a mass release thanks to the assistance of Lionsgate. Actual financial success was secondary to this end.1
You might hear all of that and assume that all this hubbub marked Coppola’s grand return after many years away from directing movies. The man behind the Godfather trilogy [the first two are each a 5/5, haven’t seen the third], Apocalypse Now, and more must have not worked in decades and decades, and had finally sold enough wine to pay his way back into the cinemas. This isn’t the most absurd idea if you haven’t really paid attention. The last major moment of Coppola in American pop culture was Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. The gothic horror isn’t a Godfather-level classic by any means, but it’s a well-liked movie that did good business at the box office and lives on as something of a cult classic.
So was Coppola kept out of the director’s chair since the early ‘90s by a studio system unwilling to put faith in his vision? If you can believe it, no. After the financial failure of his 1997 John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker (which Coppola only made to get out of a financial hole), the director decided to leave big movies behind in the 21st century, choosing to only direct self-financed films on a sporadic basis. Megalopolis was only in a return in that it was a return to big, somewhat mainstream fare, but Coppola had directed a handful of smaller films between it and Y2k, as recently as 2011 with the movie Twixt.
Why would such a legend step away from the field he helped revolutionize? The Rainmaker flopped, but it’s not like Coppola was a stranger to his movies not selling tickets. Everyone always wants to focus on his incredible body of work from the ‘70s, but a decade later, stuff like Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Gardens of Stone were straight up commercial disasters, and he kept up working with the studios after them. So I don’t buy the ‘97 Grisham adaptation as the singular reason why one of the greatest directors of all time decided to, for the most part, stop making movies.
Let’s rewind a bit. What was Coppola up to in 1996?
Jack is a 1996 comedy starring Robin Williams and directed by, you guessed it, Francis Ford Coppola. The plot follows Williams as the titular Jack Powell, a boy born with a unique condition that causes his body to age at four times the normal speed, causing this 10-year-old to look like an extremely hairy man in his 40’s. After years of homeschooling, Jack is finally allowed to attend public school to predictably cringy and wacky results. Though primarily a comedy, the movie does attempt to also have an underlying exploration about the value of a life lived, even when that life is short. There are also a lot of fart jokes.
How could this happen?
The script for Jack came from the NYU film school team of James Demonaco2 and Gary Nadeau. In ‘94, Nadeau was due to visit LA to accept a student Academy Award for his short film Red and knew he needed to have a script to try and sell to agents while he was out there. He and Demonaco buckled down and pitched story ideas to each other. Their winning idea came from a place of both sophomoric fantasy and trying to emulate an already successful film:
The original idea was just from us spitballing and saying, ‘I wish I was the size I am now when I was in the eighth grade – I’d be the king of the sportsfield!’ And then, ‘How do we do that?’ It had kind of been done in Big, and then we spun it into this rapid-ageing thing. The next day, we were writing.
I’ve seen enough of the Tom Hanks comedy Big to know that it and this movie appeal to different fantasies. Whereas Big is about a child eager to grow up realizing that adulthood isn’t all that it's cracked up to be, Jack is a nightmare of a child trapped in a body that is rapidly aging him to an early grave. But whatever, close enough for the studios. A month after finishing the initial draft, Nadeau flew to Los Angeles and sold the script for Jack on the first day that he was there.
Disney, working through their Hollywood Pictures distribution label, purchased the rights to Jack, and they knew exactly which middle-aged man-child would be perfect for the title role. There was a slight problem though. This particular man-child absolutely hated the House of Mouse.
When Robin Williams signed on to voice the Genie in 1992’s Aladdin [3.5/5], he was very specific with the terms of his contract. See, the comedian had another animated film coming out that year, 20th Century Fox’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. Williams had signed onto Ferngully before agreeing to do Aladdin, and I get the sense that he had more passion for it than Disney’s film. In an effort to avoid potentially undercutting Ferngully at the box office, Williams asked Disney to avoid using his vocal performance as Genie in the marketing for Aladdin outside of trailers.
Disney agreed, and then went back on their promise by making an absolute ton of merchandise that used Williams’s voice. If you can believe it, the man who absolutely carried the bulk of Aladdin was supremely pissed about this, and the relationship between Williams and the studio soured immediately. Now, a few years later, Disney had the chance to make it up to Robin. A new live action project with a premise that was right up his alley; how could he say no?
Williams said no to Jack immediately. At first, it was because Nadeau was somehow attached to direct (the comic star allegedly didn’t want to work with someone literally out of film school), but further then that, the comedian was tired of playing the kind of character that Jack called for him to be. I think this is extremely valid on Williams’s part. With the exception of The Birdcage earlier in ‘96, his mid 90’s so far had been defined by roles where he loudly ad libbed his way through immature character after immature character: Toys, Jumanji, and even Mrs. Doubtfire [3.5/5] all overlapped with what Disney would want him to do for Jack. Williams was a more varied performer than that, and he knew it.
In what I imagine was an effort to get the studio off his back for good, Williams gave Disney a shortlist of directors he’d do the movie with. That list must have been filled with names that the actor believed would surely never agree to direct this kind of movie. But to his surprise (and I’m sure to the surprise of Disney as well), one name on the list immediately stepped up to direct Jack. And this is where Coppola comes in.
What drew the director of the Godfather trilogy to Jack, a family comedy where the most violent moment was the comical collapse of a treehouse? To be fair to the man, Coppola is more than the movies he’s most remembered for. Looking at his filmography reveals more genre diversity than you might think if you only know the big stuff. And he had worked with coming-of-age stories before Jack; his best remembered film from the ‘80s might be his adaptation of The Outsiders. That story has a lot more grit to it than Jack, but the themes of characters caught between childhood and adulthood carry over pretty easily (I’ve never seen Coppola’s version of The Outsiders but I remember really loving the original book when I read it in middle school).
And beyond genre familiarity, the specifics of Jack spoke to the director in a more personal way. Coppola explained to The Christian Science Monitor in 1996 that, because his family moved around a lot, he often found himself feeling like an outsider among his peers, leading to a feeling of not belonging that is core to the movie. You know what? Fair enough, I can see it.
I can’t imagine how smug the producers at Hollywood Pictures must have felt calling Robin Williams to give him the news. Not only were Disney able to land Coppola, ensuring their first choice for the title role, but they were getting the director just a few years after Dracula, his biggest hit in a decade to that point. To Williams’s credit, he was a man of his word. In an effort to get on his good side, Disney had secured him one of the greatest directors of all time for his new project.
Though it’s not like the two were strangers. Williams and Coppola had met almost a decade beforehand at George Lucas’s birthday party, and in the ensuing years had become both Napa Valley neighbors and partners in the high-end San Francisco bistro The Rubicon. The two were friends, but had never had the chance to work together professionally.
Maybe it was this familiarity that made Coppola comfortable asking Williams to hangout with him and a bunch of young boys at his house for a couple of weeks. Hang up, hold on, I know that sounds bad, just give me a second.
See, Coppola somehow thought that Robin Williams of all people needed to remember what it was like to be a ten-year-old boy, so he invited the actor over to his estate alongside five or six tween boys. For a fortnight before rehearsals for the movie began, the groups spent day after day doing quintessential child activities such as swimming, camping, hiking, food fighting, and shopping at Toys ‘R’ Us.
I have so many questions. Who were these boys? Where did they find them? Were their parents spending time at the vineyard ranch too, at least partially? Nadeau says he and Demonaco spent a couple of weeks at Coppola’s estate for script rewrites; were they around for the camp stuff too? To be clear: I am NOT saying that anything dangerous or untoward happened towards these kids while they were hanging out with Williams or Coppola. I just need way more details than that Christian Science Monitor report gives on the subject. If you were one of these boys, please reach out. I want to help you tell your story.
I’d much rather do that than have to think much more about Jack. Folks, let me tell you, this movie sucks pretty bad.
In a 2021 interview with The Telegraph, you can practically hear Nadeau pleading that the original script for Jack was far more heartwarming and contemplative than what was eventually released into theaters. This initial version of the story allegedly focused far more on the theme of living life to the fullest, since in the grand scheme of things, all life is short. And if you watch Jack, you can see hints of that premise.
When Jack quietly asks himself “What do I want to be when I grow up?” in response to a school assignment, it’s actually a bit heartbreaking to hear the answer be “Alive.” That’s especially in context to his increased comfort around kids his age. In that moment, you can almost buy the tragedy of this kid doomed to a short life because of his too-fast internal clock. So what happened to fill the rest of the movie with lame gross out humor?
Disney, as it turns out, didn’t see the movie as anything other than a vehicle for Robin Williams silliness. As soon as the actor signed on, the studio told the writers to cram way more jokes into the script, the more immature, the better. The degree of goofiness that the studio called for surprised everyone, including Coppola. Evidently the legendary director was a little stunned by the fact that he would have to shoot so much farting for his latest film.
As a result, Jack is a disaster of mismatched tone. In its few moments of sincerity, the film approaches a semblance of compassionate metaphor for congenital childhood disease. In these moments, where Williams is allowed to sit still and quietly contemplate his character’s life, Jack briefly becomes actually compelling. But the movie can’t stop getting in its own way, and these scenes are far too quickly replaced by poorly done juvenile humor or extremely uncomfortable interactions with the adult world.
So much of the humor of Jack is just Robin Williams doing normal kid stuff that otherwise wouldn’t elicit even a little bit of a chuckle. Jack and his gang of friends aren’t particularly witty or clever, and they don’t even get into narratively interesting hijinks. Most of the time they just sit around their treehouse reading Penthouse and farting into cans. This isn’t meant to juxtapose against thoughtful discussions about the future and growing up. That never happens. All we get is a reductive idea of what it is kids do when they hang out with Robin Williams plugged in as someone who can easily purchase Playboy at the corner store.
I don’t want to come off as someone who hates a good fart joke or bit of physical comedy. If a movie were able to competently pull off a scene where someone trips over and falls before letting one rip, I could laugh myself into a burst blood vessel, But a movie cannot just show me a bunch of kids and men who act like kids sitting around passing gas and expect me to laugh along, especially when one of those men is Bill Cosby.
Yeah, convicted rapist Bill Cosby spends an uncomfortable amount of time hanging out with some 5th graders in this movie in his role as Jack’s private tutor. That’s just a ruinous presence in your family-friendly comedy in retrospect, but it’s not like modern context ruins an otherwise great performance. Cosby is meant to be the wise mentor figure in Jack’s life, but he’s not all that great at it. Barring one decent inspirational speech towards the end of the movie, we never really get a sense that he’s actually all that good as a teacher. Instead, what Cosby mostly excels at is getting in on the potty humor with Jack and his friends.
This isn’t the only uncomfortable interaction Jack has with the adult world. I’m really struggling to find a more delicate way to say this, but I find the movie too eager to place its main character in situations that make the audience think about sex. Beyond all of the flipping through skin mags, the actual women in Jack’s life are at the very least outrageously beautiful but more often than not distractingly sexy. Jennifer Lopez, very early in her film career, is beautiful yet modest as the main character’s public school teacher, but while his childlike crush on her isn’t too surprising, it is extremely out of nowhere and just serves to make me die of cringe when he asks her to the school dance.3 Tough to watch, but not necessarily heinous filmmaking.
Maybe Jack asking out his teacher is an expression of some unexpressed issues with his mother though. Diane Lane plays Mrs. Powell, and the camera has a very strange habit of ogling her whenever it gets a chance. I would normally chalk up lingering shots of her legs and a particularly cleavage-heavy Wicked Witch costume at the start of the movie as just a ‘90s flick throwing in some sex appeal. But one of the more distinct choices Coppola makes in Jack is frequent cuts to the POV of our main character. It leads to a feeling of seeing the world through his eyes, even during the moments when we’re not seeing things directly from Jack’s perspective.
So with that in mind, why is Lane so often shot to highlight her sex appeal? Is Coppola implying an Oedipus complex in his main character? Is that why he asks his teacher out?
I wish that was the end of it. But legendary ‘90s babe Fran Drescher is in this movie as the mother of Jack’s best friend, and due to contrived shenanigans, she has no idea that our protagonist is actually 10-years-old. This, unfortunately, goes exactly where you think it does. Watching Robin Williams pretend to be an uncomfortable child being handed drinks in a dingy bar before Drescher sticks her tongue in his mouth goes beyond cringeworthy. It makes me sad, the unfortunate nadir of the movie’s misguided predilection to putting Jack in adult situations rather than just sticking to the joke of a kid who looks like an adult in elementary school. It’s not like that yields a whole lot of great humor, but it’s better than the alternative.
Unfortunately, this is a symptom of the movie lacking any real conflict past the first twenty minutes. Jack isn’t a young man stuck between two worlds. He clearly feels more comfortable and thrives with his child peers. Besides some early scenes of kids laughing at him, there aren’t even any societal pressures to keep him out of school like irate parents or paparazzi. The only conflict in the entire movie after Jack makes his friends is a half-baked health scare that vaguely threatens to speed up his aging process even more, sending him into a spiral of depression that ends in that bar with Drescher.
He eventually ends up back in school anyway, and the health concerns are never addressed again. It’s just all so contrived, and it puts poor Jack in uncomfortable situation after uncomfortable situation. Williams is by far the best part of the movie, but even then his performance is only occasionally as profound as it should be. The rest of the time, Coppola just asks him to fidget around and say the word “butt” a lot.
Jack occasionally reaches the heartwarming profundity it was originally meant to achieve, and it’s a competently made film. This is Coppola, after all. But even with an occasionally charming Robin Williams performance at its center, the movie doesn’t know how to use the star that the studio so desperately wanted. The comedy feels beneath him and the serious moments are never given enough time to breathe. And it’s not like the man was some unknown that no one knew how to work with. This is the fourth time I’ve written about one of Williams’s movies in this column (including his uncredited cameo in To Wong Foo), proof of a man that was a certified hitmaker. How do you misuse him like this?
I went into a couple of Reddit threads in the research for this movie and found plenty of people that loved Jack when they were kids and were surprised to later find out how poorly it had been received. That may be you reading this column right now. If it is, do not believe your nostalgia. I have strangely vivid memories of catching at least half of Jack on TV when I was very young and I do not remember enjoying it even as a kid. As an adult, it made me feel icky all over.
Coppola sent the screenwriters the first edit of the film, and Nadeau immediately began worrying. He knew the movie had diverged massively from the original script that he had written months and months prior, but held out hope during filming that something could still come of the project. But after seeing the initial cut, Nadeau immediately knew that he had become “the man who destroyed Francis Ford Coppola’s career.”
In a sense, he was right. Jack reviewed very poorly, with a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes from contemporaneous reviews. And the movie’s reputation hasn’t improved in the subsequent years either. David Rollinson wrote a fantastic retrospective review for The Spool in 2021 that goes into a whole of great depth on the many reasons why Jack doesn’t work. But at the end, he’s able to push all that aside and get to one of the great truths of going back and watching movies from your past:
Leaving the theater in 1996 there was a sense that something was amiss, that the movie didn’t quite work but perhaps this author was missing something. Revisiting the film two Jack Powell lifetimes later one realizes wisdom and understanding do not always come with age.
Sometimes a movie just sucks.
Jack only just barely beat three-week-old A Time to Kill for the top spot in its release weekend, but it didn’t go on to set the world on fire. The movie lingered in theaters for months despite more than a handful of weekends where it made less than $100,000. A final domestic gross of $58 million means that, when adding marketing to the $45 million budget, Jack was a loss for Disney despite the caliber of their star and director. The combination of Williams and Coppola was good enough for one August weekend at the top. Now, the movie is only a regrettable question mark in the careers of two otherwise legendary creatives.
There’s a Coppola quote on the IMDB page for Jack where he defends the film as a fun endeavor and says he doesn’t regret the final cut of the movie, but I can’t find a source for it. It’s possible the Megalopolis director does believe that, but I won’t put words in his mouth if I can’t find the interview it’s from. Instead, I’ll suggest that maybe he should regret the film if he doesn’t already.
Jack ended up being the first in a one-two punch of bombs for the director that made him quit studio filmmaking altogether. Would The Rainmaker have done better if it hadn’t been Coppola’s follow up to Jack? Honestly, there’s a chance general Grisham burnout would have soured the movie’s chances at financial success anyway. But I have to imagine if Coppola had instead just taken a bit of a gap between Dracula and The Rainmaker, the latter movie would have done at least a bit better off of hype alone.
That’s the problem with showing people that you can make bad movies. No matter how vaunted the catalogue of your work is, if folks really didn’t like the last thing you made, they’re just going to assume your next stuff will be just as bad. Robin Williams will recover from this movie and appear in this column again. Francis Ford Coppola will not.
Jack uses the fake condition of its title character as a metaphor for the kind of childhood diseases that make life far too short in an effort to show that the value of life is in how you live it day by day. When my wife and I adopted our dog Roger in 2022, we had no idea we’d be learning the same lesson. Despite being a mutt, Roger had a congenital heart defect most common in purebred German Shepherds and Labs. We found out about it a month before we had to say goodbye, one year after we first met him.
Roger wasn’t here for a long time, but I know that he enjoyed life to the fullest, whether we were taking him to the beach to visit my parents or were just taking him around the neighborhood for our morning walk. I wish I could tell you that Jack inspires that same beautiful message in the end, and that watching it made me want to live life to its fullest. I’m glad I didn’t need Jack to learn that lesson, because its mangled screenplay struggles to convey any idea more complicated than how funny it is when people pass gas.
The only thing I was sure of once the credits started rolling and its terrible Bryan Adams ballad started playing was that I had wasted my time.
Rating: 1.5/5
Next Week: If you can believe it, the next box office topper we’re looking at is a golf movie that I actually recommend. I know, I’m surprised too! We’re taking a trip to west Texas to meet Tin Cup in next week’s edition of A Life Through Film.
See you then!
-Will
It might have been nice though. I tried explaining all of this to my wife, a normal human being, last night and she had never even heard of Megalopolis.
Demonaco will later be a recurring figure in this column because he’s the creator of The Purge series of films.
This dance that the movie mentions absolutely befuddles me. It’s never brought up before or after this scene, but also why would a school have a dance where TEN-YEAR-OLDS are expected to pair off and go as dates?