On "Big"

After recently watching "Braveheart" for the first time at the behest of a friend, I have now seen "Big" at long last. I had lent out my VHS copy of "Turner & Hooch" (which I will admit gave me some pause), and it came out that I hadn't seen Big. The friend I lent Turner & Hooch to in turn lent me her copy of Big. Of Hanks' early films, I've seen the aforementioned Turner & Hooch, I've seen "Joe Versus The Volcano", and I guess I've at least seen most of "The Money Pit".

Finally I can add Big to that list, and it certainly is good. Hanks is, it's no secret to say, exceptionally good at taking on the qualities of a child. His moves and his delivery of lines feel right. There's an awkwardness and an exuberance at the same time that work very well together. The rest of the cast is at least good, but Hanks is really great. It's a hell of a thing to think of him being more or less out of comedies within a few short years of this film's release.

After any old money I watch, I love seeking out all the contemporary reviews that I can. It's interesting how critics respond to them while they're still new. The reaction to a new movie called Big is different from the reaction to the "Tom Hanks classic Big". I was taken by the fact that most reviews referenced the fact that Big was the latest in a long string of body-switching movies. It made me think again how much more important it is to get something right than it is to be first with it. No one talks about Big being the fourth or fifth body-switching movie in the space of a couple years. They talk about it being a great movie, and they don't even know there were others.

The thing that could have done in this movie, it seems to me, is the trick of getting Hanks' character away from his family and off on his own. It's a very different movie if you have his parents aware of his predicament and working to solve it. That's more like "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids". If you're going to get him away from the family, that's tough, and they picked a method that could have gone wrong. It's a a real credit to the movie that it overcomes the film-long subplot of his mother thinking that he's been kidnapped.

Having enjoyed Big so much, I'm eager to scratch all the Hanks movies I haven't seen off my list. I definitely want to finally watch "Splash" and "Bachelor Party", among others. I really need to watch the ones I have seen again as well. Hanks is just so good that I can hardly believe it. It's really too bad, in a way, that he got the notion he had to transition to drama. Multiple Oscars may argue he made the right move, but to the detriment of what might have been in the comedy genre. Comedies always get the shaft.