After making a wish on a spooky carnival machine, 12-year-old Josh Baskin (David Moscow as a child, Tom Hanks as an adult) wakes up the next morning to find he’s aged roughly twenty years. His best friend Billy Kopecki (Jared Rushton) is the only one who believes his tale, so Josh leaves home, moves to the big city and lands a job at a toy company, where his natural expertise makes him a whiz when it comes to developing and marketing new product.

Josh also finds romance with coworker Susan Lawrence, (Elizabeth Perkins), who initially believes he is her ticket to the top but eventually becomes attracted to his childlike innocence and lack of pretense, but his newfound love and success cannot overcome his desire to return to his old life.

CRITIQUE

Despite the fact it gave us a drama about a man trying to reconnect with his autistic brother, a jet black comedy based on a classic French novel, a drama set in the south at the height of the civil rights movement, a drama about a travel writer who finds his life renewed by a relationship with a dog trainer, and a drama about a Czech doctor who finds himself embroiled in his country’s political struggles, 1988’s best cinematic offerings were an action flick about a cop fighting terrorists in a highrise and a fantasy about a preteen who wishes he weren’t too short to ride a roller coaster.

Penny Marshall’s Big, the latter of those two (not sure why I felt the need to clarify that), is my personal favorite from that year, despite the fact that, on the surface anyway, it’s the sort of movie that makes me cringe, the sort of movie your mother would deem “cute” as the end credits roll.

But Big is somewhat deceptive. It works purely as a comedic fantasy, but it’s smarter, deeper, and darker than similar movies (of which there were roughly 4,392 from 1987-89); it enriches and overcomes its fantasy trappings by embodying its plot with believable characters who act in consistently believable ways. It’s everything it tries to be, but you never see the machinery working. This is one of the most effortlessly successful movies I’ve ever seen.

Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg’s (yes--his sister) Oscar-nominated script is a cornucopia of good ideas. Most body-switching movies (which Big technically isn’t, but we’ll treat it as such for the sake of argument) use their premise as the starting point for a sitcom-style treatment of shopworn plotting (remember Like Father, Like Son or Dream a Little Dream?); just think about how many of these movies feature ironic rants about loud music or the inevitable scene of the child-turned-adult yelling at the adult-turned-child to grow up and become responsible.

While it requires the standard suspension of disbelief, Big never asks you to accept anything even remotely silly. In a lesser movie Josh would have run down to a car lot and test drove a Porsche after discovering he’s suddenly aged two decades. Not here; here the first thing he does is attempt to rectify his situation. It’s only after he discovers that a solution isn’t immediately in the offering that he begins trying to pass himself off as an actual adult, and even then he’s doing it only out of necessity.

Hanks’s performance, which nabbed the movie’s only other Oscar nom (talk about getting the shaft), could very well be the best performance of his career. It’s undoubtedly one of his best, as well as the first to prove that he could do more than silly comedies (and I’m talking about stuff like The Man With One Red Shoe, not Bachelor Party).

Playing a twelve-year-old kid can’t be an easy task; virtually everyone knows or has known a boy this age, so virtually everyone knows how such a kid would act. Hanks--not to mention Marshall, Ross, and Spielberg--knows exactly how such a kid would act, and he’s absolutely perfect at handling every situation.

His performance--much like the movie itself--is perfectly encapsulated in the scene where he checks into the seedy motel. It begins with a comedic tone, takes on a dangerous air, then briefly shifts back to comedy before ending on a sad note. The entire sequence can’t be more than a couple minutes long, but Hanks manage to run the gamut with his performance, seamlessly, smoothly navigating his way through it. It’s simply beautiful work.             

I don’t why I never noticed it until now, but watching Big this time around I realized that Josh’s adult life parallels what he could very well have experienced had he remained a kid for those six weeks. As a child he crushes on a girl who’s going out with a guy who can drive, while as an adult he begins a relationship with a woman who latches onto men she thinks can improve her job status. (And look at the scene in which Perkins’s left-behind lover--played by John Heard--exacts his revenge on Hanks. Where does it take place--on what is essentially a playground.)

Also, the exchange between Hanks and Rushton in which the latter finally lays everything out on the table--you know that such a blowup would have come sooner or later, because it almost always does in a relationship such as theirs. This is great, great writing.       

Like the most recent DVD release, this Blu-ray disc contains both the theatrical version of Big and an extended cut. There’s nothing to indicate the extended version is Marshall’s preferred cut; it’s an extended cut in the simplest, purest sense, reintegrating material that originally hit the cutting room floor and beefing up the running time.

The new footage is largely inconsequential to the movie (it’s almost all character moments, although one scene does serve to spoil one of the movie’s best jokes), serving only to make it longer than need be. The theatrical version is perfect, the extended version not quite.

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--offers another average ‘80s-flick experience. It’s soft and a little hazy, with only close-ups and brightly lit exteriors (the racquetball game and the sequence where the adult Josh wanders around his old neighborhood look very good) providing anything in the way of impressive detail or color reproduction. Black levels are okay, and the movie’s grain structure is handled in a surprisingly natural way. The transfer provides an improvement over the previous DVD releases, but not much of one.

THE AUDIO

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is also par for the course as these things go. Remixed from the original stereo elements, it provides almost no surround action and not much of a stereo spread. Dialogue has a slightly uneven quality, and the low end sits this one out. The only component of the mix to really benefit is Howard Shore’s fine score.

English and French stereo and Spanish and Portuguese mono tracks are also included. English SDH, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Portuguese subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The Big Brainstorming Audio Documentary (available only on the theatrical cut) is a pseudo-audio commentary comprised of audio recordings Spielberg and Ross made throughout the script’s various stages of development. It’s nice to see a movie’s story given so much focus (especially one with such good writing), but this piece cannot compare to what a good, comprehensive commentary can offer. 

Eight deleted scenes (14 minutes) are also included. All of this material can be found in the extended cut (although these scenes don’t comprise all of the new material there), but I say they’re better off being viewed here. Marshall provides brief introductions for five of these scenes.  

Big Beginnings (16 minutes) is a sit-down chat with Anne Spielberg, Gary Ross, and producer James L. Brooks, who discuss the movie’s protracted genesis period, beginning with Ross’s initial idea and ending with the casting of Hanks.

Chemistry of a Classic (24 minutes) is a retrospective featurette. Most of the principals turn up, but Hanks is nowhere to be found.

The Work of Play (10 minutes) is a waste of disc space centering on several real-life toy company employees.

AMC Backstory: Big (22 minutes) is, as you undoubtedly already know, an episode of AMC’s old Backstory series. As with the other featurettes, it contains behind-the-scenes clips as well as interviews both new and old. 

Carnival Party Newswrap (2 minutes) is another waste of disc space, this one featuring footage from the movie’s premiere.  

A few theatrical trailers and TV spots (two of each) close out the extras.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ll say it again--Big was the best movie of its year. The presentation has its problems, and I’d still like a more thorough selection of extras, but the movie itself is so good I’m not going to complain too much.