Big Kid on Campus : Robin Williams Attempts to Free the Inner Child in Coppola’s ‘Jack’

There was a time when a movie starring Robin Williams and directed by Francis Ford Coppola would have been something of value. That time is not now and “Jack” is not that movie.

A sappy comedy set in the San Francisco Bay Area, “Jack” is so rich in wasted talents it may have happened simply to give Northern Californians Coppola and Williams a chance to make a film and sleep at home.

“Jack” is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before. And because what they’ve chosen to do now is a brazen and inept reworking of the Tom Hanks-starring “Big,” which had a 12-year-old boy wishing to be an adult and getting magically transformed into one.

“Jack” begins with young couple Karen and Brian Powell (Diane Lane and Brian Kerwin) making an unexpected trip to the maternity ward. Though Karen is only two months pregnant, their son Jack is about to be born.

Jack, it turns out, is afflicted with a singular condition that causes his cells to grow at four times the normal rate. It follows, the doctors tell a flummoxed Karen and Brian, that “at age 10 he will look like an ordinary, full-grown 40-year-old man.”

Enter Robin Williams, who plays Jack when he’s 10, kept out of the kid mainstream by well-meaning parents who have turned overprotective and tutored at home by the kindly Lawrence Woodruff (Bill Cosby), wiser than Obi-Wan Kenobi and a hell of a pal to Jack as well.

Inconsequential as it may seem, this question of whether Jack should go to public school and interact with his fifth-grade peers is presented as a recurring and nearly insoluble moral dilemma. Predictably, Jack does go, gets teased, toughs it out, makes friends and in general has nothing of particular interest happen to him.

Unlike “Big,” which knew that the joke in this situation was seeing how a clever kid would make his way in an adult’s world, “Jack” has unfortunately chosen to look at things through the least interesting end of the telescope.

Not only is Jack far from the cleverest in his class, the film’s “Dumb and Dumber” approach dictates considerable time spent watching an adult actor doing stupid kid tricks like participating in flatulence contests and eating stomach-turning goo on a dare. Jim Carrey, not surprisingly, does this sort of thing better.

And though one of the film’s producers insists that the part of Jack “screamed out for Robin Williams,” it was probably the kind of scream only a producer could hear. In fact, at this point in his career Williams is too obvious a choice to be successful. He does have his moments, but he’s too precious on screen, too conscious of his effects and his specialness, to be effective. Even having a 10-year-old “child technical advisor” (a concept funnier than anything in the film) can’t bridge that gap.

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Given that Williams has, with questionable artistic but undoubted financial success, increasingly focused his talents on films with a high schmaltz content, he must have connected with the trite “free the inner child” motif of the James DeMonaco & Gary Nadeau script. Its theme is summarized by a character who insists Jack is “the perfect grown-up because on the inside he’s still a kid.” Right.

If that wasn’t enough in the pathos department, the film delights in focusing on Jack’s fears of aging and death, employing the familiar metaphor of a butterfly to symbolize the inevitably brief span of the boy’s years on Earth. Heartbreaking it’s not.

As for director Coppola, also a respected vintner who has included a costume party character dressed up as one of his bottles of wine, his work is getting harder to differentiate from the usual nonentities who have directed many of Disney’s live-action efforts over the last few years.

Coppola can’t even successfully animate Jack’s scenes with Dolores Durante (Fran Drescher), the divorced mother of one of Jack’s friends who mistakes him for husband material. The best thing you can say these days about the five-time Academy Award winner is that he turns out a fine bottle of wine.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for some sexual references. Times guidelines: jokes about flatulence.

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‘Jack’

Robin Williams: Jack Powell

Diane Lane: Karen Powell

Brian Kerwin: Brian Powell

Jennifer Lopez Miss Marquez

Bill Cosby: Lawrence Woodruff

Fran Drescher: Dolores Durante

Adam Zolotin: Louis Durante

An American Zoetrope/Great Oaksproduction, released by Hollywood Pictures. Director Francis Ford Coppola. Producers Richard Mestres, Fred Fuchs, Francis Ford Coppola. Executive producer Doug Claybourne. Screenplay James DeMonaco & Gary Nadeau. Cinematographer John Toll. Editor Barry Malkin. Costumes Aggie Guerard Rodgers. Music Michael Kamen. Production design Dean Tavoularis. Art director Angelo Graham. Set decorators Armin Ganz & Barbara Munch. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.