Godfather (61 page)

But Jack's adult body, coupled with his child's mind and emotions, can present drawbacks for him. He nurses a school-boy crush on his teacher, Miss Marquez (Jennifer Lopez), and he asks to be her escort to a school dance, since she is tall enough to dance with him. He seeks to ingratiate himself with her by offering her a bag of red Gummi Bears. She is touched but gently and tactfully declines his invitation, calling herself an elderly lady, too old for school dances.

Jack gets into real trouble when he goes to a Café, hoping to find a girl tall enough for him to dance with. But first he encounters Paulie (Michael McKean), a middle-aged, confession-prone regular. He engages Jack, who looks forty, in a heart-to-heart talk about getting old, which he calls “God's cruel trick” on men. “You start losing your hair,” he says, and, significantly, the toupee that he sports in a futile effort to hide his age is slightly askew.

Then Dolores Durante (Fran Drescher), a promiscuous divorcee, sidles into the club. She happens to be the mother of Louie (Adam Zolotin), Jack's best buddy at school, but she is unaware that Jack is only ten years old. So she unabashedly displays a romantic interest in Jack. Louie had earlier remarked that his mother “looks for love in all the wrong places,” so she is running true to form. When she takes a shine to Jack, a jealous drunk resents the attention that she is giving him and punches him out. Jack gets into a slugfest with the drunk and knocks him flat. So he spends the night in the slammer, to the chagrin of his parents.

Todd McCarthy terms the tavern scene a high spot in the movie, “sparked by vibrant performances from Drescher and McKean.” The sequence is amusing because it involves Jack in “passing” physically as an adult, which he can do effortlessly, “while desperately trying to behave as an adult as well,” which is decidedly not easy for him.
¹³
Thus, when Jack dances with Dolores, he ineptly attempts to imitate her gyrations on the dance floor, with hilarious results.

This scene raises some serious questions for syndicated columnist Stephen Witty. For him it illustrates the path the entire movie might have taken if it had been more ambitious. After all, if Jack is chronologically and emotionally ten years old, but physically forty, “then he's a sexually adult male with a child's lack of inhibitions.” Consequently, his cuddles with Dolores “take on a twisted look,” and raise issues far too complex for the movie and its “feel-good story.”
¹⁴
Actually, because the movie was designed to appeal to children, Coppola skirts the sexual implications that the plot might otherwise have raised. By the same token, there is no hint of pedophilia in Dolores having designs on ten-year-old Jack, since she assumes he is a mature adult.

At any rate, after Jack lands in jail, his overprotective parents consider isolating him once more from the big, bad world to spare him further travails. But his loyal chums prevail upon them to permit Jack to remain in school with them. Nevertheless, Jack's physician dutifully warns Jack's parents that “Jack's internal clock is ticking faster than normal,” and that premature signs of aging will regularly occur, which will indicate that his time is running out. In short, Jack will grow old and sick and inevitably have a short life span. At this moment Coppola cuts to a butterfly landing on Jack's windowsill. Jack picks it up—it is dead. The image implies that life is short for a butterfly and for Jack too and once more demonstrates Coppola's strong visual sense, which never deserts him when he is filming.

In the epilogue, set seven years later, an aging, somewhat feeble Jack, who by this time is going on seventy, is valedictorian when his class graduates
from high school. “My life has been short,” he begins, “but in the end none of us has very long on this earth. Life is fleeting—it's like a shooting star: it passes quickly. But while it is here it lights up the sky. So we must live life to the fullest while we are still here. He concludes, “When you see a shooting star, think of me. Make your life spectacular. I know I did.”

Jack's final speech struck a chord in Coppola: “The idea is that it really isn't how long you live; it's how completely you live your life that is important…. My son Gio only lived twenty-three years, but it was a complete twenty-three years. He got to do everything—he got to be a kid, he got to be an adult, got to fall in love,” got to be second unit director on
The Cotton Club
.
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The picture ends with a dedication to Coppola's granddaughter Gia, Gio's daughter: “To Gia, ‘When you see a shooting star….'”

Coppola was thoroughly lambasted by the reviewers for
Jack
, in much the same way he was excoriated for his previous Disney outing, “Life without Zoe.” Gene Siskel, one of Coppola's biggest fans in the past, took great exception to
Jack
, as did most of his colleagues. Apparently Siskel noticed that one of the revelers at the costume party in the movie's opening sequence was dressed up as a bottle of wine from Coppola's vineyard. “Coppola has been expanding his vineyard,” Siskel opines, “and my guess is that his
Jack
fee paid for a lot of grapes. But
Jack
is anything but vintage Coppola. Williams takes over the movie and basically does some talk show riffs on what it's like being a boy…. My advice: Buy the wine; put a cork in the movie.”
¹⁶
(For the record, Coppola put his director's fee for the film back into American Zoetrope, not into the Niebaum-Coppola winery.)

Michael Wilmington's more benign appraisal of the picture called it “sunny, humane, and high-spirited,” and complimented Coppola at the very least for outclassing his material: “
Jack
does manage to triumph over its likeable but derivative script, which is no more provocative or funny than it is original.”
¹⁷

Admittedly, Coppola's cast served him well throughout the movie. Robin Williams brings star charisma to the title role. Bill Cosby copes adequately with the part of Lawrence Woodruff. Fran Drescher injects some vitality into the role of the dubious, loose-moraled Dolores Durante, and winsome, wise-cracking Adam Zolotin as her son Louie proves once again W. C. Fields's adage that child actors and dogs are the best scene-stealers in the business.

On the other hand, Coppola's direction is competent but not inspired. Lacking the invention or the fluency of his other films,
Jack
suffers by comparison. Coppola has always had a predilection for youth flicks, but with
Jack
he has not progressed much beyond his earlier “coming of age” movies
like
You're a Big Boy Now, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish
—or
Peggy Sue Got Married
, the picture that
Jack
most resembles as a mild fantasy. Overlong at 113 minutes,
Jack
finally wears out its welcome. The milk of human kindness has curdled in this dark comedy about a youngster who grows old before his time because of an incurable disease. Still, the movie takes some imaginative risks as it veers between stark drama (Jack growing old) and knockabout farce (the barroom brawl).

In the last analysis, Coppola's best films were used against him by the reviewers of
Jack
. Critics had come to have substantial expectations of a director with Coppola's elegant craftsmanship. “Coppola is one of the greatest of the post-war American filmmakers,” Wilmington writes, “and though you can't expect him to give us a
Godfather Trilogy
or an
Apocalypse Now
every time out, you can expect more ambition and ideas” than are evident in
Jack.
¹⁸

As things turned out, nobody liked
Jack
but the public. When it opened across the United States on August 9, 1996, it quickly put $11 million in the Disney coffers on the first weekend, thereby becoming the top-grossing picture in the country. It obviously reached its target audience of youngsters. By the end of the year it was one of the top box-office attractions of 1996, with $60 million as a domestic gross.

The Rainmaker
, the other film treated in this chapter, would likewise turn a handsome profit. But, unlike
Jack
, it would also enhance Coppola's reputation as one of the finest filmmakers of his generation. Although
Rainmaker
was never really undervalued as a major Coppola picture, its reputation has continued to grow over the years, and it has finally been recognized as one of Coppola's warmest and richest films.

Sometimes a film comes off, like
The Rainmaker
, and sometimes it does not, like
Jack
. A director cannot always predict the outcome when he makes a film. So every moviemaker's career is marked by peaks and valleys. Still a director like Coppola cannot be faulted for taking risks in his films just because the risks do not always pay off. A moviemaker who does not take risks in creating his films will surely fall by the wayside, whereas a venturesome director whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp continues to be of interest. Critics and audiences alike too often are impatient with an artist's need to ripen and develop his talent gradually. A serious artist needs and deserves some degree of tolerance and patience on the part of critics and audiences while he refines his methods and style. In the upcoming epilogue, then, I shall make some concluding remarks about how Coppola has progressed throughout his career.

Some good pictures come from Hollywood. God knows how, but they do.

—William Faulkner

You're stepping off a cliff when you start to make a film.

—Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola learned during his career that a director not only has to work hard to achieve the kind of artistic independence that qualifies him to be an auteur, but also that the director has to work just as hard to keep it. For example, although a director like Coppola has often been looked upon as a maverick who makes films perhaps more subjective and personal than those of many of the other Hollywood directors, it is important to realize that his motion pictures have often been financed by some of the oldest and largest of Hollywood studios: Paramount, Columbia, and Warners. That these companies have been willing to allow him such a great degree of artistic freedom is yet another indication that the big Hollywood studios are well aware that they must make an effort to present contemporary audiences with fresh material and not just a rehash of the old commercial formulas long since overfamiliar to moviegoers.

On the other hand, a canny director like Coppola realizes that a filmmaker must cooperate with the studio that has invested in his film if he expects to get backing in the future. In other words, the cooperation must be on both sides. And Coppola does not mind meeting company demands, as long as he can meet them in his own way. Thus he has it stipulated in his contracts that any cuts the studio wants to make in a film of his are to be made under his supervision.

The relationship of artist and industry will always be a difficult one, since the director is primarily concerned with preserving his artistic integrity, while the industry is primarily interested in safeguarding its investment. This conflict of interest will inevitably lead to compromise, but, as has been seen in the films covered in this book, the compromise can often be one enabling the director to produce a film that is recognizably his own and, yet, one from which the studio can expect a return on its investment.

“I feel that I'm not reckless or crazy,” says Coppola. “It's just that I'm primarily interested in making films more than in amassing money, which is just a tool” needed to make films.
¹
Without the safety net provided by a Hollywood studio, not even bravery and determination can keep an independent filmmaker's dream alive—hence, the effort of going it alone and having to solicit studio backing for each film that he makes is considerable. The “Flavor of the Month” mentality of many producers—whereby they try to gauge changes in public taste—is difficult for a director to cope with. Movie executives, Coppola tells me, “can see the artist coming, cap in hand, with a project he wants to do,” and they will say, “Well, he wants to do it very badly, so he's going to have to make a sacrifice because it's not a project that has been instigated by us.” By contrast, if it is a project that the studio is initiating, it is possible to obtain immense amounts of money to do the film.

“I've done so much for the studios,” he adds elsewhere, “and yet they resent even putting me in a position where I don't have to go to one of them with my hat in my hand and have them tell me what movies I can or cannot make.”
²
As television becomes to an ever increasing degree the medium that claims the largest segment of the mass audience in the way the cinema once did, motion pictures are being thought of more and more in the same category as the legitimate theater: a medium that can afford to appeal to a more discriminating audience that wants fare a bit more challenging than what they can usually find on the tube. As this happens, film directors are more frequently being given a freer hand in making films that are more inventive and personal than has usually been the case in the past.

After all, the major studios began to extend artistic freedom to independent
filmmakers in the first place because studio executives realized that they were losing touch with the moviegoing public's taste. The great virtue of a director like Coppola is that he has for the most part been able to make films his own way while at the same time remaining aware of what would appeal to his audience. He has, in short, shown his respect for the creative freedom he has achieved by working so hard to win it and by using it so well.

“There are two kinds of movies you make,” Coppola explains. “There's your dream project that you are basically trying to figure out how you are going to get financing for” (like
Apocalypse Now
), “and then there's the job that's brought to you.” Although
Peggy Sue Got Married
was more of a job than a dream movie in Coppola's view, he was gratified by the way that it turned out. Still Coppola admits to accepting from studios at times assignments he did not find particularly attractive in order to afford to make films of his own choosing. “The thing that unites young, inexperienced directors and older, experienced directors” is that neither type of filmmaker often gets the opportunity “to do their personal work,” he says.
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