To wrap up the summer movie season, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 12: Mack & Rita explores the comedic potentials of what happens when a woman wakes up one morning to discover that she's become a much older version of herself. By no conceivable stretch an original idea, and this seemed like a good time to revisit the most iconic version of the trope.

There are a few different ways one could go about situating Big, one of the biggest hits of 1988 (#4 at the U.S. box office with $115 million, back when that was still real money). It was the first movie directed by a woman to break $100 million at the box office, as Penny Marshall's second-ever film in that capacity, and the first one where she mostly knew what she was doing (Marshall would also direct the second movie by a woman to break $100 million, 1992's A League of Their Own). It was a major, major stepping stone in the career of Tom Hanks, who in one swoop earned his first Oscar nomination for acting, and established himself as a beloved, bankable star who could carry a hit movie almost entirely through his shambling charisma. It is to a certain extent the main reason that you are aware of the name of iconic toy retail FAO Schwarz if you live outside of the New York metropolitan area.

But I think the way I'd like to start is by pointing out that Big is, in fact, a pretty good movie. I confess that this took my by surprise. I hadn't seen the film in a solid two decades or more before this rewatch, and I would have been willing to agree to a number of largely complimentary things: it's a charming movie. It's a funny movie. It's a sweet movie. It's a silly movie. But honestly, I don't know if I remembered that it was a good movie. It starts from one of the highest concepts of the high-concept '80s: a 12-year-old boy, Josh Baskin (David Moscow), finds a mysterious fortune telling machine at a carnival, and this being the end of a somewhat crummy day of feeling like puberty, growth spurts, and some measure of autonomy can't come soon enough, he wishes to be "big" (which I don't think would have been the exact phrasing he'd have used if that wasn't the title of the movie, but that's not important). The next morning, he wakes up to find that he has the body of a 30-year-old man (Hanks), and with his mother (Mercedes Ruehl) immediately taking him for a kidnapping housebreaker, he is forced to spend the next several weeks navigating the world of adults until he and his best friend Billy (Jared Rushton) are able to track down the fortune telling machine. This involves fall ass-backwards into a high-level job at a privately-owned toy company, whose owner, MacMillan (Robert Loggia) views Josh's utterly guileless attitude and inability to successfully play-act at being an adult as charming eccentricities that make him an ideal candidate for conceiving exciting new toys. Meanwhile, go-go '80s power executive type Paul Davenport (John Heard) assumes Josh is some kind of craft political type playing up the dumb innocent act as a way of backstabbing his way to the top, while Paul's ex-girlfriend and different flavor of power executive, Susan Lawrence (Elizabeth Perkins) goes from sharing Paul's suspicions to admiring Josh's open way of being in the world, and admiring that late-'80s Tom Hanks had a sexy-cute thing going on. No adult in the movie ever seems to find it weird that a 30-year-old man with no past acts with the emotional maturity of a young adolescent; must have been one of those
"New York in the '80s" things.

That lends itself pretty obviously to a kind of large, broad, manic comedy built around Hanks mugging up a storm as a literal overgrown kid, while everyone around him plays various flavors of straight man. I assume that would be what e.g. the version of Big with Robin Williams would look like (the filmmakers approached a pretty large number of actors before landing on Hanks, but Williams was not to my knowledge among them. Robert De Niro was, though, and was apparently very close to being a done deal, and that would be a hell of a different version of this movie). And the film isn't completely absent such touches. Its most famous scene, in which Josh starts enthusiastically playing a large floor-mounted electronic piano at FAO Schwarz and gets MacMillan to join, is basically that kind of broad, goofy "oh-ho, the adult man is acting like a silly kid, that's wacky" comedy, which is perhaps why I had mentally filed the entire feature into that mode. John Heard obviously thinks he's playing the villain of such a movie, too.

There are four people who definitely aren't thinking in those terms, though, and they're all pretty crucial: Marshall, Hanks, Perkins, and above all Ruehl, who isn't holding back one tiny thing in playing the desperate, shell-shocked mother of a kidnapping victim (she thinks), ripping the terrified misery out of her body like a primal scream only she's too stunned to actually scream. It's a performance that would frankly break the movie if it favored her too much, which is probably why she's hardly ever onscreen (without having measured it, I'd readily believe she gets less than 90 total seconds of screentime after Josh transforms into Hanks). But it is terribly grounding for the film to have her at all, reminding us that there is a considerable human cost to this frothy coming-of-age fantasy. And we don't even really need the reminder, since Hanks is doing very much the same thing: he's playing the character as genuinely terrified and helpless early on, with one great moment where the film holds and holds on him as he's left alone in a shitty hotel room, curled up on the mattress, wracked with sobs; Marshall generally employs a fairly simple, hands-off approach, less a 'style" than the conspicuous absence of style, and it rarely pays off more than here, when the camera just pans mercilessly over to watch Josh's pain.

Hanks is, in general, just superb here; it remains, I would go so far as to say, one of the most technically thoughtful and precisely-controlled performances of his entire career. If there's any flaw, it's one that's basically already baked into Gary Ross & Anne Spielberg's screenplay: Josh-as-an-adult frequently behaves as somewhat less than 12 years old mentally, a bit more interested in toys and running around, a bit less interested in these marvelous alien creatures "women" (when Susan starts to put the moves on Josh, Hanks plays this as though he doesn't actually know that sex exists). We can ascribe a little bit of that to Josh being underdeveloped even for his age, and one of the smarter things Big does is to avoid making the character even a tiny bit precocious; in fact, he seems a little bit dim (certainly, Billy is the brighter of the two boys). But Moscow's performance still feels in general a bit more mature than Hanks's.

But that's a silly thing to nitpick over. Hanks is wonderful playing a child, and he's wonderful playing a child who is badly pretending an adult, and he's wonderful playing the later version of the second thing, when Josh has started to get the hang of things and is possibly growing a bit too comfortable with his adult persona. One of the things that most of the people involved in making Big are very good at is to treat this as a serious story; insofar as it's a comedy, it's because Josh is a bit of a goofball and the situation is ridiculous, but the situation is always taken at face value. And that gives us some very fine moments from Hanks, and some very fine and frankly sad moments from Perkins, who's practically playing this as a tragedy: a woman who has problems letting herself expressive vulnerability who has selected the most horrifically inopportune time to begin doing so. Her loneliness and embarrassment at the end are at least as strong emotional cues as Josh's readiness to put away adultish things and return to his appropriate age.

I'm not actually sure if that last thing is a strength. And it gets us to the ways in which Big, as winning as it is, and as surprisingly honest about the emotional lives of its characters as it is, is still only "pretty good", and not "great", though it has some great moments. It is, for one thing, just bizarrely pieced together - the 104-minute theatrical cut (which this review is based on) was later followed by a 130-minute extended cut on home video, and I have no idea if that represents Marshall's director's cut or not (it's never been marketed that way). But the theatrical cut definitely has the choppiness and random ellipses of something that had 26 minutes removed without any real though to how that would work; in particular, it is blacked by fades to black that communicate nothing and honestly make the whole thing feel like a reclaimed TV movie. Which is sort of Marshall's overall vibe; the performances take it out of that mode, and so does Barry Sonnenfeld's basic but classy golden-hued cinematography, but there's a certain sense of the movie consisting of "bits" rather than "scenes" that one gets from other TV-actors-turned-directors (okay, so fair is fair: I don't know if there's actually another example of this beyond Ron Howard, but it's a film with powerful Howard vibes - though Marshall is better with her cast than Howard was at this point; just compare Hanks here to Hanks in Howard's Splash).

This is hardly a fatal blow, but it does leave Big feeling a bit shapeless. Marshall is obviously looking to make this a good-natured character piece rather than a propulsive comedy, so the shapeless isn't the worst; still, it feels extremely shaggy, even more shaggy than I thing its genial vibe justifies. There's no grace to the opening, which shoots exposition at us and gets Hanks in for Moscow as fast as it dares; the ending is similarly rushed, having Billy do all the work of resolving the main conflict off-screen, and then ending on a bittersweet beat that weirdly deprives us of Josh reuniting with his parents (the film very clearly decides in the final stretch that Susan is a more important character than he is; not an unfair choice, but certainly not one that the movie has tried to earn). To be clear, this can all be true, and at the same time Big can be extremely pleasant and winning and adorable even when it's a little bit sad. It's a very good crowdpleaser that comes within an ace of also being a pretty damn taut character drama. But I'll happily take one of those if I can't have both.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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