One of the nicest things about Big is that it isn’t. This comic fantasy, unlike so many recent efforts in this genre (Explorers, Weird Science, Gremlins), is a modest movie. It doesn’t punch its audiences with special effects, outlandish settings, contraptions, hairbreadth escapes, or various monsters from outer space or underground. Instead, offers the one element that cat hake a fantasy memorable rather than startling: emotion. All the best fantasies have emotional cores: the frightening megalomania of The Invisible Man, the yearnings of the poor in De Sica’s Miracle in Milan, the agony of failure in It’s a Wonderful Life. Back to the Future, with its hero’s exploration of his parent’s past, almost had such a core, but the moviemakers skimped on it in favor of a whizz-bang climax featuring lightning and time travel.
Big has no time machines or laser swords, only a silly, creaky carnival wish-machine—the kind that takes your quarter and ejects a card telling you your wish has been granted, while the mechanical genie inside the machine’s glass top shakes his plastic head and lights up at irregular intervals. But this is enough to grant twelve-year-old Josh Basken his wish to be bigger, a yearning brought on by his desire to date a girl taller than himself and to take those carnival rides for which there are height restrictions. When Josh finds himself locked within a thirty-ish body (Tom Hanks’), cut off from the security of his nice, middle-class home, with only one friend (another twelve-year-old) who shares his secret, he must make his own way in the world: get a job, learn to handle money, and, most difficult of all, learn the devious language (both verbal and body) of adults.
Sometimes he lucks out through sheer ignorance. When Josh asks his new boss (Robert Loggia), “What’s a sales report?” the manufacturer mishears the question’s inflection and thinks that his curiously fresh and ingenuous employee is dismissing reports as business forecast. Fed up himself with such things as flow charts, the kindly capitalist admires what he takes to be healthy iconoclasm. Perceiving also that our hero has a tactile appreciation and profound understanding of the company’s product, toys, he starts steering Josh up the executive ladder.
Big is short on rationalizations. The story keeps bounding forward, relying on our good will and willingness to forbear asking such questions as: When Josh’s friend Billy leaves his bigger buddy at a crime-ridden flea-bag of a hotel, how does the nicely dressed and obviously vulnerable Billy, all atone, make his way safely back through the nocturnal New York streets (lined with prostitutes and hoodlums) without suffering a mugging or worse? Since Josh’s mother sees her son after his transformation and mistakes him for a kidnapper, wouldn’t the police be looking for someone answering to Tom Hanks’ description? True, New York City is a large enough place to get lost in, but wouldn’t a police artist’s portrait of the supposed kidnapper be on the evening news? And how does Josh land his initial job as a computer operator without demonstrating any secretarial skill? (The scriptwriters try to finesse the last with a half-hearted old school tie gambit; but it might have been funnier, as well as more realistic, to show that a twelve-year-old’s game-honed skills are enough to hold a low-level position in business.)
Never mind. The movie’s strength lies not in the logical linkage of situations but in the apt and juicy ways in which each episode is staged. When Josh awakens on the first morning of his new corporality, Marshall aims her camera at floor level so that Josh’s big feet and hairy shins are the first evidence we see of his change. There is something irreducibly sturdy and ridiculous about adult male feet. Unlike their female counterparts, they have never been sexualized by TV ads or even the most elegant footwear. Even though we have been previously alerted that Josh’s magical transformation has taken place during the night, when his homely extremities hit the carpet with a thud, we can’t help but laugh at the new grossness that Josh’s spirit is now locked into. Our derision is comradely in the same way that St. Francis’s was when he referred to his own body as “Brother Ass.”
Even better is the scene in which Josh completely wins over his already well-disposed boss, thus accidentally insuring his own success. The two are in F.A.O. Schwarz when they come across an oversized keyboard that can be played by being stepped upon. After gingerly pressing a few keys, Josh and his boss begin to sound chords and play melodies. Their playing is by necessity a dance, tentative at first, then becoming, by degrees, charmingly clumsy, hammily confident, and finally ecstatic. Penny Marshall films the scene in one stationary shot with no cutting in for facial reactions. There’s no need for any because we see how joy fills the bodies of the two as they begin to hit the right notes. As Robert Loggia’s thick, strong, aging body takes on lightness and Tom Hanks’ gawkier physique assumes confidence and poise, man and boy seem to be exchanging the peculiar virtues of their different ages.
Meanwhile, curious customers gradually fill up the background of the shot. They stare, smile, laugh, and finally applaud as the music and the scene peak. It’s a blissful passage, and its bliss isn’t a matter of a contraption on display but of the human emotion provoked by a contraption. Best of all, the scene ends just before you wish it would go on forever.
Few films depend as much on one performance as Big does on that of Tom Hanks. If we spent our viewing time marveling at how well the actor mimics the moves of a twelve-year-old, the movie would be no more than a freak show. To be sure, Hanks does get those moves just right. He knows that an abashed child shrugs with the shoulders bunched up just below the ears. But Hanks uses all these tricks of posture and gesture to make us feel what the little Josh inside the big Josh is feeling. He adroitly. keeps us focused on a person, not on a stunt.
This well-acted character is limited, however, by the scriptwriters’ view of childhood. When Josh’s adult girlfriend (the pleasingly astringent Elizabeth Perkins, a welcome antidote to the under- and over-aged Barbie dolls now clogging American screens) is explaining what she now finds repulsive about her former Yuppie boyfriend, she remarks that “everything is a fight with him.” And it’s clearly shown that what she finds attractive in Josh is his openness, his vulnerability, his lack of aggression. But don’t we all know children who make everything into a fight? Who are aggressive, manipulative, and even macho? And aren’t we glad that their boundless juvenile energies aren’t yet contained within stronger physiques? And didn’t Josh make his wish in the first place because he wanted to score with girls, to take greater risks? Yet, when Josh achieves a bigger physique, he is floppily beatific.
Decades ago, James Agee, after enthusiastically praising Zero for Conduct, the French film about childhood, went on to note its limitations.
[Zero’s child heroes] have the aloof, dangerous beauty of young, wild preying animals; whereas some of the schoolboys I knew were merely unnoticeable, others sick, others gentle or timid, and still others were safe-playing, sycophantic dolts from the day they were born, faculty members already. I wish they had been shown in this variety; however it might have complicated Vigo’s child-worship and his anarchic fury.
Although Big doesn’t try for anarchic fury, it, certainly partakes of child worship.
Big contrasts interestingly with a previous American comedy about an innocent making his way among desperately jaded adults: Being There, written by the Polish emigre, Jerzy Kozinski, and starring Peter Sellers as a simple soul raised in isolation, who knows nothing of life except the facts of gardening and the psuedo-facts of television. The child-man becomes a great success by alternately citing horticultural lore and regurgitating the jargon he has heard on the tube. Everyone he encounters, from elevator operators to the President of the United States, takes him for a genius. In all this we are meant to see the adults as self-deluding, vain, unperceptive.
Kozinski, a refugee from totalitarianism who rose from poverty to riches in the U.S. through entrepreneurial cunning, artistic insight, and social adaptability, uses the figure of the big child to indict what he takes to be the dangerous naivete of the American people. The Peter Sellers character doesn’t shed holy radiance on people; he inadvertently makes them wallow in their own fatuities.
But Josh’s childishness really is a radiance that elicits the best from people. Employer Robert Loggia rediscovers the joy of his business; girlfriend Elizabeth Perkins discovers the bliss first of innocent, celibate romance and then, once she has finally gone to bed with Hanks, the tenderness of maternal solicitude.
The French children of Zero for Conduct defeated the monstrous adults who tried to suppress them. Polish writer Kozinski’s child-man showed up the adults around him. But the child-man of Big saves the adults he encounters. Nobody can beat the Americans when it comes to child worship.