Cinema: Little Boy Lost and Found BIG

Hollywood loves a gimmick — and too often loves it to death. One year there are three movies about gallant farm women battling fate and fortune; the next it’s comic-book heroes saving the world or muscle-bound hulks trying to write a different ending to the war in Viet Nam. This year’s flavor is a gentle fantasy about body switching: the young and old changing places with supposedly comic results. But 18 Again!, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son were more frantic than comic, and it remains for Big, the last out of the gate, to show that this season’s gimmick was, by golly, also a good idea, one that should make Big one of the hits of the summer.

The plot is so beguiling that the only real surprise is that no one thought of it before (though Francis Coppola’s 1986 Peggy Sue Got Married was Big in reverse). Josh Baskin (David Moscow), a twelve-year-old who has just discovered girls, realizes one day that he is not big enough to get the one he wants, a sophisticate of 15 or so who, of course, likes older boys. What could be simpler than to plunk a quarter in a carnival wishing machine and ask to be, well, big? But Josh did not specify just how big, and when he wakes up the next morning, he is the same size and the same age as Tom Hanks.

Outside, Josh is in his 30s; inside, he is still a sheltered child, whose most bruising experience has been dueling with some electronic monster in a video game. Not recognizing the boy in the man, his frightened mother uses a butcher knife to evict him from their home in suburban New Jersey. It is left to Josh’s more worldly friend Billy (Jared Rushton) to escort him across the Hudson to Manhattan and to help him find a job as a computer operator in a giant toy company.

What follows is predictable but daffy and delightful nonetheless. Who knows more about the kind of toys a twelve-year-old would like than a twelve-year- old? None of the grownups at the toy company, anyway. “What’s a marketing report?” asks Josh, who has never heard of such a thing, and the company president (Robert Loggia) is so impressed with his ability to look at the product rather than the charts that he appoints him vice president in charge of development, assigning him to do nothing but sit in an office and play. Like the Peter Sellers character in Being There, Josh is held in awe for what is perceived as his simple, childlike wisdom.

| Besides an executive office, his rewards include an expensive toy-filled loft and a real live girl, or woman. Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), who has slept her way to the top, is seduced by something she has never before seen in a man: innocence. She invites herself back to his apartment, only to discover that he really is innocent. She can sleep over, he allows, but he gets to be on top — the top bunk, that is. Eventually, however, in a subtle and charming scene, Josh learns how a man and a woman can share the same bed, and that adulthood has its own pleasures.

But as Susan drops her tough shell and becomes more like a child, Josh becomes more like an adult, hard and ambitious. A suit replaces his jeans, a businessman’s shoes his sneakers, and he begins worrying about grownup things like marketing reports. He no longer has time to play with Billy, who alone has shared his secret. Stalking out of the toy tycoon’s office, Billy reminds Josh that he is three months older and that Josh is still really a boy. The bittersweet ending is the film’s only real disappointment, perhaps too predictable, too lacking in surprise and invention.

Yet the wonder is that the scriptwriters, Anne Spielberg and Gary Ross, have, until then, always steered in the right direction, avoiding the wrong turns that are so easy to make in such an insubstantial fantasy. Penny Marshall’s directing style is one of understatement, and she sets a tone of instant nostalgia that only occasionally descends to the sentimental. The casting is just about perfect. For an adult to play a child is probably more difficult even than for an actor with 20/20 vision to play a blind man; it requires a whole new way of looking, talking and thinking. But Hanks, who emerges from this film as one of Hollywood’s top comic actors, is both believable and touching as a boy lost in a grownup world.

Perkins is equally skillful in the only slightly less demanding role of a woman who falls in love with a man who is a boy trying to act like a man. Loggia, who played the down-at-the-heels detective in Jagged Edge, gives his toy-company president just the right kindly-cranky edge. But the true star, after Hanks himself, is Rushton, as the best friend who tries to bring Josh back to the real world — or so Hollywood would like us to believe — of childhood and innocence and unrequited puppy love.