Tom Hanks is often described as America’s dad because of his ability to portray everyday characters with a strong moral center and captivating gravitas. Yet all dads were once children and in one of Hanks’ earliest hits he played a child who wakes up with a grown-up’s body. This concept had been done before and has been done plenty of times since, but Big (1988) directed by Penny Marshal is one of the best executions of such a concept.
This being 2020 I am still stuck indoors for most weekends with a lot of time on my hands and access to thousands of hours of content. Disney is on its way to owning every movie in existence, which allowed me to finally watch Big in its entirety. I had seen bits of it before on TV, but now I got to cross off yet another movie from my list during this quarantine year. For anyone else stuck indoors with no way out, you could do a lot worse to spend your time waiting for things to go back to normal.
Lots of things have changed since Big came out in the 1980s, but some things never change. Like plenty of 13-year-olds, Josh Baskin (David Moscow) likes having fun with toys, hanging out with his best friend Billy (Jared Rushton), and he desperately hopes girls will start to notice him soon. It’s a perfectly normal childhood for a young boy living in the suburbs of New Jersey, but Josh is impatient to grow up after being told he is too short to go on a ride with a girl at a theme park. As if the universe were sensing his frustration, a fortune teller machine called Zoltar seems to appear out of nowhere at the park, allowing Josh to make a wish to be big. The fact that the machine was working even though it wasn’t plugged should have made Josh think twice.
Enter Tom Hanks the next morning taking over the role of Josh who now has the body of a 30-year-old but is still sleeping in a bunk bed and wearing underwear that is now way too tight. His attempt to explain the situation to his mother is just the right balance between awkward and funny as he tries to pull his pants down to show her a birthmark. Things fare better with best friend Billy who helps Josh find temporary lodging at a crummy hotel in New York City until they can locate another Zoltar machine and reverse the situation. Since the Internet was not in every household in those days, they have to wait six weeks until the government mails them a list.
Even though this is clearly a fantasy movie, there were a couple of moments from this point on that I simply did not buy. Even though Josh has never had a job interview before and has no social security number, he manages to get a job at a toy company after one interview and with a completely made-up resume. His only real work experience has been delivering newspapers, and yet he manages to do a good enough job as a data entry clerk that his cubicle neighbor (John Lovitz) feels threatened. Was it that easy to get a job in New York City in the 1980s? And did no adults ever get suspicious or worried about young Billy frequently travelling to the big city all by himself?
What won me over was how fun the story becomes. After Josh impresses the company boss Mr. MacMillan (Robert Loggia) with his knowledge of toys, Josh gets a promoted to a position that involves testing the toys and coming up with new ideas. Josh and MacMillan have an especially fun bonding moment with a foot-operated keyboard at a company toy store. Even funnier is the friction between Josh and Davenport (John Heard), a stuffy executive who seems to have forgotten he sells toys for a living.
A major reason why the film works is Hanks’ performance. From the moment he is on screen he successfully conveys the energy and innocence of a 13-year-old boy. During a ride in a limousine with Elizabeth, a colleague (Elizabeth Perkins) who is interested in him, Josh is busy pressing every button he can see and screaming out of the retractable roof. When they get to his toy-filled apartment and Elizabeth asks if she can spend the night, of course Josh asks, “You mean, like a sleepover?”
That is very risky territory even though Josh has the body of a 30-year-old, and it makes me wonder if Big could be remade today. Personally, I think it all depends on the execution of the material and that Penny Marshall made a movie that can be enjoyed by anyone, big or small. The movie’s message is pretty simple: enjoy being small while you can and once you do grow up, don’t lose the sense of fun you had as a child. It probably won’t land you a cushy job at a toy company, but life is more enjoyable when you remember to have fun. If Robert Loggia can let loose at a toy store, anyone can.
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