Look at their faces, Robin Williams looks like he’s been up to mischievous no good and Tim Roth looks dumbfounded like, “you’re fucking shittin’ me.”
And maybe it’s with good reason. Remember “Jack”? Francis Ford Coppola’s near career-crippling film with Robin Williams? The film was savaged by critics and it basically rang the death knell for the aging, seemingly obsolete and out-out-touch once-auteur (“Jack” rates just above syphilis and anal cancer on the Metacritic scale, though “The Rainmaker” quietly redeemed Coppola before he bowed out into a 1o-year retirement to tend to his rather good vineyards and wines).
Does anyone remember what “Jack” was about, but more importantly, does anyone care? The answer is clearly no, but having seen Coppola’s heady metaphysical opus and return to filmmaking “Youth Without Youth,” we’re sort of perplexed and bemused by the two films similarities and we posit for you the reader: Was “Jack” just a silly test-run for a concept that had plague and preoccupied Coppola for over a decade? (his unfilmed “Megalopolis” – a project he ultimately abandoned – concerned itself with the same subject matter, we’ll get to that now).
Jack’s “Plot”:
The severely maligned “Jack” is about boy with a unique aging disorder: one that makes him age 4 times faster than normal. The gilm begins when Jack (Robin Williams) is 10 years old, but looks 40. He tries to go to public school for the first time, but problems arise and hilarity… well apparently it never ensued in the least. Music/movie heads take note Jennifer Lopez has a role in Jack in one of her earliest film appearances as a school teacher; the object of his first affections he can never have.
Youth Without Youth:
Ok, so Coppola’s latest ‘YWY’ is about an aged professor (Tim Roth) who is during a freak accident is transformed into a younger self half his age, but his memory, wisdom and experiences are retained. He runs into his own problems when he later meets a woman (the comely Alexandra Maria Lara) who has been through a similar accident, but within proximity of the scholastics teacher starts to rapidly age. Without spoiling the rest of the plot, you can see where this is going, right?
So? ‘YWY’ is bit like a quasi-version of “Jack” in reverse only with serious, metaphysical concerns rather than tedious, silly ones. Was this really an idea that Coppola labored with for ten years? Really?
Either way, coincidence? Does anyone want their money back yet? Ok, so “Youth Without Youth” was quite good, or at the very least, it really, really left us thinking, but really?
Trailer: “Youth Without Youth”
Trailer: “Jack”