Meanwhile, Rudy keeps one eye on Kelly’s case. He takes her back to her house to collect her belongings after he has convinced her to file for divorce. Once there, Rudy is forced into a confrontation with Cliff, her abusive mate. When Cliff begins brutally slapping his wife around, Rudy intervenes, and they engage in savage hand-to-hand combat in which a lot of furniture is smashed to pieces. This is the most harrowing depiction of domestic violence in a Coppola film since Carlo attacked Connie in The Godfather.
Rudy finally knocks Cliff senseless with Cliff’s own ball bat. Thinking that Cliff has been subdued, he stalks out of the house. But Cliff comes to. The terrified Kelly picks up the bat that Rudy had discarded and administers what turns out to be a death blow with a resounding thud. Kelly has killed her husband, but Rudy eloquently convinces the district attorney that she did so in self-defense.
In the movie’s deeply moving climax, Rudy presents documentation that proves that the life of Donny Ray Black—who has died in the course of the trial—could have been saved by the operation that the criminally negligent insurance company patently should have funded. Rudy shows in open court the videotape of Donny Ray’s deposition, made shortly before his death, in which he testifies, “Leukemia was detected in plenty of time for a bone-marow transplant to save my life.” Rudy shrewdly freezes the image of the haggard, pale young man on the screen in the courtroom, and Donny Ray seems to be staring plaintively, with dark circles under his eyes, directly at Wilfred Keely, the CEO of Great Benefit. Then, for good measure, Donny Ray’s wretched father strides over to Keely and silently thrusts a cherished photograph of his dead boy in Keely’s face, while the CEO averts his eyes in shame.
The jury ultimately sees through the slick and manipulative legal tactics of the high-powered lawyer, Leo Drummond, while at the same time the jurors are favorably impressed by Rudy’s sincere, straightforward defense of his client. The jury, accordingly, awards the Black family $50 million in punitive damages. Consequently, the movie’s title refers to a lawyer who causes a deluge of cash to rain down on his client. In short, Rudy Baylor is a latter-day David, who has vanquished Goliath in the person of big-time attorney Leo Drummond, whose client, Great Benefit, is bankrupted by the verdict. Keely shortly thereafter is apprehended at the airport as he desperately attempts to flee the country.
When Rudy mulls over his triumph, he wonders if he really wants to wear the mantle of a legal eagle, which this case has conferred upon him. He considers instant retirement from the law profession: “Every client that I ever have will expect this kind of victory, nothing less,” he says in a voiceover. He is not sure he can live up to such grandiose expectations. “I still love the law,” he adds, “but maybe I should be teaching it, rather than practicing it.” As the movie ends, Rudy and Kelly are driving away from Memphis, preparing to build a new life somewhere else.
Early in the film a client of Bruiser’s notices that he has a fish tank in his office with a shark swimming around in it. He observes, “A live shark in a lawyer’s office. It must be a joke.” Since Bruiser is a killer shark, it is no joke. Coppola ingeniously plants this incident at the beginning of the movie so that he can pick up on it at the end. As Rudy and Kelly ride off into the sunset, Rudy says on the sound track, “I don’t want to wake up some morning and find that I have become Leo Drummond. And then you’re nothing but another lawyer joke—just another shark in the dirty water.” The movie concludes on this thought-provoking reflection.
The Rainmaker opened on November 21, 1997, to critical hosannas and big box office. It earned $46 million in domestic rentals, rivaling the grosses of Godfather II. It was generally rated a well-crafted picture and by far the most satisfying adaptation of a John Grisham novel. Critics also agree that Herr’s cogent running narration gave the movie its spine, providing a pithy, morally nuanced commentary on the legal profession. Jonathan Rosenbaum applauded Matt Damon’s assured performance, plus the many star turns and glittering cameos by Jon Voight, Mickey Rourke, and Teresa Wright, as well as the solid work done by Mary Kay Place and Red West as Donny Ray’s parents and by Johnny Whitworth as Donny Ray. He also handed a well-deserved bouquet to Elmer Bernstein for his richly textured score.8 Bernstein’s underscore is one of the most evocative scores ever contributed to a film set in the Deep South and is redolent with the colors and rhythms of old-fashioned gutbucket jazz, featuring an electronic organ and a guitar.
Besides its barb-filled dialogue and luminous cast, one notes in The Rainmaker the sheer vibrancy of Coppola’s eye for detail and the scope of his storytelling. The film in essence affirms life in all its ambiguity and complexity, briefly banishing death even while contemplating it.
Michael Wilmington, who awarded the film his top rating of four stars, is not alone in comparing The Rainmaker, with its brilliant courtroom crossfire, to Otto Preminger’s classic courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The Rainmaker, Wilmington contends, is “a richer, deeper, more enjoyable work” than most films about court cases. “Working near the top of his form, Coppola and his extraordinary cast and company turn an expert, crowd-pleasing best seller into a film of greater warmth, humanity, and humor.”9 As such, the picture richly deserves to be called, in this writer’s view, one of the best courtroom dramas ever made.
There remains one other Coppola film to consider, one which is unfortunately not in a class with The Rainmaker. It is a minor effort that serves as a footnote to the director’s illustrious career. Walt Disney Pictures, for whom Coppola had filmed “Life without Zoe” for New York Stories, brought him a script by Gary Nadeau and James De Monaco entitled Jack, in which the title character has the mind of a ten-year-old in a forty-year-old body. Coppola was immediately attracted to the material because it called up some childhood memories of his own.
Jack is afflicted with a fictitious disease that makes him age at four times the normal rate, a factor that cuts him off from normal children. The screenplay caused Coppola to remember his bout with polio as a boy: “When I was nine I was confined to a room for over a year with polio, and because polio is a child’s illness, they kept every other kid away from me. I remember being pinned to this bed, and longing for friends and company,” says Coppola. “When I read Jack, I was moved because that was precisely his problem; there were no children in his life.” Hollywood insiders wondered why Coppola involved himself in another Disney picture after the debacle of “Life without Zoe.” But, aside from his affinity with the story, Coppola welcomed the opportunity to plough his director’s fee back into American Zoetrope. In addition, Jack reminded him of an earlier film: “Peggy Sue Got Married was a kind of sweet fable,” he explained, “and in a way Jack is like that.” (In Peggy Sue the situation that obtains in Jack is reversed: she is a forty-year-old woman who finds herself in her teenage body. “Even though Jack didn’t originate with me, I tried to tackle the story with as much feeling and love as I could.”10
Jack (1996)
Coppola did not do much tinkering with the screenplay of Jack, but he did modify it in some interesting ways. The film begins with a pre-credit sequence in which a woman is rushed in to labor, crying, “It’s too soon. It’s not even two months!” She then gives birth to a premature baby. “Now that’s a pretty serious kind of opening for such a whimsical movie,” says Coppola. “So I added a thing where the mother is at a beaux-arts ball; when they rush her into the hospital,” she and her husband are wearing bizarre costumes straight out of The Wizard of Oz. This gives a wacky kind of “Preston Sturges” feeling to the scene.
For his production team Coppola was able once more to bring back production designer Dean Tavoularis and editor Barry Malkin, with John Toll (The Rainmaker) as director of photography. Tavoularis and Coppola chose location sites in Northern California, in easy commuting distance from Coppola’s Napa estate, just as he had done for Peggy Sue Got Married. As a matter of fact, the rambling old house inhabited by Jack and his family closely resembles Peggy Sue’s family manse in the earlier movie.
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Robin Williams was set to take the title role, and Coppola heartily approved. Williams can be childlike, Coppola stated, “but he’s such an extraordinarily intelligent man that I knew he could pull off the illusion” of being a child trapped in an adult’s body.11 Diane Lane, whose association with Coppola dated way back to The Outsiders, took the part of Jack’s mother, Karen Powell.
During the three-week rehearsal period at Coppola’s Napa estate, he encouraged the children in the cast, who would play Jack’s schoolmates, to improvise as they engaged in games like hopscotch and in childish pranks with Williams. By the end of rehearsals, Williams was not a superstar to them any more, but just one of the gang. “We just ran around up at his place,” said Williams. “[I]t was great, because you assimilate behavior without even knowing it.”12 Principal photography started in September 1995 and proceeded in a routine fashion.
The concept of a boy with a man’s body had been done before, most notably in the Tom Hanks vehicle Big (1988), in which a twelve-year-old gets his wish to grow “big” granted temporarily by a carnival wishing-machine. In Jack the boy’s rapid growth is not caused by magic but by an irreversible disease. That gives the present film some poignancy. It is evident that, since Jack ages physically four years for each calendar year that he lives, he may not reach twenty.
In the film’s prologue Jack is born fully developed after a two-month pregnancy. After the prologue the story leaps ahead a decade, whereby Jack is ten and looks like a robust adult of forty. His parents, Brian and Karen Powell, in the intervening years have kept him at home. A kindly school teacher, Lawrence Woodruff (Bill Cosby), has come to the house regularly to tutor Jack. Since Jack has no ordinary contact with other children, Brian, with Woodruff’s support, persuades Karen to liberate Jack from his cloistered existence and let him go to elementary school with other children his age. “Just because a person is different,” says Woodruff, “he shouldn’t be an outcast.” Be that as it may, Jack’s classmates initially see him as a freak and ridicule him during class and in the schoolyard. After all, Jack towers over them, and when he sits in a school desk on his first day in the fifth grade, he is too big for the desk, which tips over and collapses under his weight. The other kids gradually accept him, however, when they realize that his size can benefit them. He is a topnotch basketball player at recess, and he looks old enough to buy them Penthouse at the local drugstore.
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.15 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
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