Jack The Bear

The title character, young Jack Leary (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), has just moved to Oakland with his family after the death of his mother (Andrea Marcovicci). Mom died in a car accident that followed an angry argument with John (Danny DeVito), father of Jack and his younger brother Dylan (Miko Hughes). John is a TV kids' show host with many childlike qualities, but with an adult fondness for hitting the bottle when his spirits are down.

The three move into a lower middle-class neighborhood and John takes a job as "Monster of Ceremonies" of a late-night horror movie slot on an Oakland TV station. He becomes a local celebrity, entertaining the neighborhood kids with ghoulish games and making Halloween a real event. One of the family's many strange neighbors is Norman Strick (Gary Sinise), who takes loving care of his dog and of the car in which he crashed and lost a leg. When the kids sneak into his house and Norman injures himself chasing them away, John takes the sinister, short-haired figure to the hospital.

John's drinking problem is worsened by pressures at work, though he is liked by his assistant (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and producer (Carl Gabriel Yorke), and by disdainful observations from his parents-in-law about his failings as a father. His antics are also becoming a source of irritation to Jack, who's bitter over his mother's death and edging into an uneasy adolescence. Things only get worse when Jack falls for a schoolmate (THE MAN IN THE MOON's Reese Witherspoon) who dumps him to date other guys--though she's highly entertained by Dad's dinner-table routines.

After Norman shows up at John's door on Halloween campaigning for a neo-Nazi politician, John drunkenly lampoons him on the show and is suspended. When Norman discovers his dog dead on the Learys' lawn the next morning, he strikes back by kidnapping Dylan, who is later found, unmolested but so traumatized that he cannot speak. The incident causes Jack's grandparents to take custody of both children. John cleans up his act to win back his parenting rights, but not before Jack runs away from his grandparents and back to his father. On his first night back he helps his dad fend off Norman, who sneaks into their house after cutting its power and phone lines. John regains custody of the children and the three face the future on an optimistic note when Dylan regains his power of speech.

The debut film from TV veteran and "thirtysomething" co-creator Marshall Herskovitz, JACK THE BEAR falls prey to TV's weakness for overstuffed plots and frequent climaxes. The sheer number of problems that beset the family is implausible; the Norman sub-plot is so awkwardly grafted on that it feels like it has strayed in from another film; and the attempt at thematic unity via the monster metaphor--they're out there in the street, but they're also here in our minds--is forced and perfunctory.

The novel by Dan McCall from which JACK is adapted is dark and funny, a kind of hippie Catcher in the Rye. A far more humorous character than he ended up being in the film, Jack also experiments with sex and marijuana, elements not even hinted at in this sanitized, politically correct version. In one scene, Jack has a confrontation with a teacher at his progressive school who wants the student to call him by his first name and "get in touch with his feelings." In the book, this ties into a general theme of Jack's contempt for phoniness; on film, it plays like an incongruous attempt at humor that doesn't work.

If JACK remains watchable and even, at times, moving, it's almost entirely thanks to fine casting and acting. Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. is wonderfully direct and unaffected as a young adolescent forced into a paternal role. Danny DeVito achieves the perfect combination of charm and frustrating immaturity, and does a good job of making us believe in his pain. As Dylan, Miko Hughes provides the requisite amount of terminal cuteness.

The effects on a family of males of the sudden, tragic death of the mother is both a worthy and rare subject for a film, but is ill-served in this melodramatic mishmash of too much and not enough. The effect is to make JACK look and sound like nothing so much as a dysfunctional, big-screen version of "The Wonder Years." (Profanity, violence.) leave a comment