home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=93TT1312>
- <title>
- Mar. 29, 1993: Cinema:The Best Intentions
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 29, 1993 Yeltsin's Last Stand
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- REVIEWS, Page 63
- CINEMA
- The Best Intentions
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>By RICHARD SCHICKEL
- </p>
- <qt>
- <l>TITLE: Jack The Bear</l>
- <l>DIRECTOR: Marshall Herskovitz</l>
- <l>WRITER: Steven Zaillian</l>
- </qt>
- <p> THE BOTTOM LINE: Filmmakers with sitcom sensibilities aim
- for sober truth and end up in gloomy muddle.
- </p>
- <p> We are supposed to take John Leary (Danny DeVito) warmly
- to heart. He has a childlike nature, at its best whimsical and
- gallant, at its worst careless and a little dim about the
- relationship between cause and effect. A recent widower, he is
- doing his best to single-parent two young boys (Robert J.
- Steinmiller Jr. and Miko Hughes) and to make good in his cute
- new job (as the comically ghoulish host of midnight horror
- movies) in a new town (Oakland, California, circa 1972).
- </p>
- <p> Had the people who made this movie been content to develop
- that situation lightly, they might have made an inconsequential
- domestic comedy. But they are abustle with larger, if entirely
- inchoate, ambitions. They have invested John with a real problem--alcoholism--and they have plunked the Learys down on a
- block that is a sort of dumping ground for the damned of the
- lower middle class. Among their new neighbors are a neo-Nazi,
- a drug-addict mom who dies of an overdose and someone who keeps
- a pack of killer Dobermans in the yard next door. For a family
- teetering on the brink of dysfunction, this environment seems
- bound to push them over the edge. Sure enough, Dylan, the
- younger son, is kidnapped and rendered speechless by the trauma.
- </p>
- <p> This crisis is purely arbitrary. So is its eventual
- resolution. It comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere
- interesting. But that's the way of this film. The possibly
- admirable intention is to avoid the false good cheer of the
- typical family drama. But it has been replaced by the equally
- false gloominess that often passes for seriousness in Hollywood.
- Jack the Bear plays as if Maxim Gorky had for some reason been
- asked to try his hand at a sitcom.
- </p>
- <p> The direction by Marshall Herskovitz, one of the creators
- of television's thirtysomething, is at least true to the spirit
- of the script--at once ponderous and digressive--but
- without a clear, clarifying attitude toward it. DeVito's
- performance is characteristically strenuous, but he is lost--who wouldn't be?--among the story's conflicting moods and
- emotional claims. They should have called it Jack the
- Unbearable.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-