Disney's The Kid

Written by: Audrey Wells Starring: Bruce Willis, Spencer Breslin, Emily Mortimer, Lily Tomlin, Jean Smart

“Disney’s The Kid” is as slick and soulless a piece of Hollywood product as the Disney entertainment (and I use that term loosely) juggernaut has ever turned out. There is a reason that people of good sense hate and fear Disney: their unerring instinct for rendering any concept, any idea, any sensation, as bland and sterile as a dry gauze dressing. I realize that the company pursues this goal in the name of money, which no doubt thrills its shareholders, but the end result is the utter banishment of anything that might excite, scare, or challenge an audience. And Heaven save us from anything that might raise a hackle. Because of this (or perhaps despite it) parents routinely entrust their children’s sensibilities to the theme park behemoth. I tremble for our nation’s future. Call it the process of Disneyfication. Call it whatever you like; it’s present in full force in this insipid fantasy about learning to love one’s inner child. The reasonably diverting premise--successful jerk meets himself as a child--is flattened by an aesthetic that I am sure the folks at Club Disney would like to think of as childlike, but in fact is childish. Every feeling is half a level deep.

Every obvious emotional button is pushed, usually several times, in an increasingly repellant effort to teach us that Yes, It’s OK To Cry. The film wastes a good comic performance by Bruce Willis, reducing him at the end to shouting up to the sky, “I am not a loser,” as if we ever believed that he was one, just because Audrey Wells’s script said so. Jon Turteltaub has directed a few entertaining films (“Phenomenon,” “While You Were Sleeping”), but subtlety has never been his strong suit. He’s big on the broad emotions and the tearful epiphanies. Still, I can’t hold him altogether responsible for the stew of “Disney’s The Kid.” (While we’re on the subject, why “Disney’s”? Are they afraid we might confuse it with “Paramount’s The Kid” or “Warner Brothers’s The Kid”?). I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Michael Eisner himself was holding Turteltaub in a headlock on the set, to ensure that nothing that would upset a flea got by the camera’s lens. Willis plays Russ Duritz, a high-powered image consultant who is mean to everyone, including his secretary Janet (a scene stealing Tomlin) and his assistant Amy (Mortimer) whom everyone in the theater will recognize from minute one as The Girl For Him.

Into Russ’s perfectly controlled world (and by the way, his suits and his house are extremely nice) drops a tubby kid named Rusty (an effective Breslin), who, as Russ comes to realize, is none other than he himself at age eight. After quite a bit of tiresome sparring, the old and the young Russ bond, and help solve each other’s problems. In Rusty’s case, this seems to involve learning how to fight, so he can punch out a bully who torments him at school. I find it surprising, and not a little ironic, that this movie’s idealized version of conflict resolution is fisticuffs, coming as it does from the studio that would like to stake out a position as guardian of our children’s morals. (I guess take-home lessons are situation dependent.) Besides, hostility is exactly what the movie is trying to leach out of the older Russ. Is fighting really the best way to do that? Russ’s problems, in turn, appear to be solved by letting painful memories of childhood surface, and then crying about them. Writer Wells must have gone to Akmed’s Discount House of Psychotherapy for these powerful insights. The picture opens with a recurrent--not to say annoying--motif of a shiny red biplane flying around.

It is quite photogenic, but so far as I can tell, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. I suppose it is a metaphor for something, though exactly what is unclear. Such fanciful asides are typical of the script, which never really assigns rhyme nor reason to the proceedings. There is no internal logic here, in which sense the script is lazy. We don’t know why or how the Kid (and I am eternally tired of movies in which adults refer to a child unironically as “kid”--when’s the last time you did that?) appears, or why a diner--or that annoying biplane--keeps popping up and disappearing, or why Russ and Rusty can suddenly travel back through time. Worst of all is a scene towards the end of the picture in which Russ and Rusty meet yet another version of themselves. It plays like an outtake from a bad episode of “Star Trek.” Not only does it not add to the story, it doesn’t make any sense, even within this script’s limited definition of the word. (In contrast, a good recent example of the past and present colliding is “Frequency,” which establishes its premise and plays by its own rules.)

The picture has its enjoyable moments. The opening scenes establishing Russ's character are tight and sharp (raising my hopes for the rest of the movie), and Willis is still a master of the ironic glance or remark. Young Breslin has an appealing presence, and does a good job mimicking his older self. (The last time Willis starred with a child was the stunning “The Sixth Sense,” but the gulf between the two pictures is enormous.) Emily Mortimer is pleasant enough, but her girl Friday role is razor thin (as are so many women’s roles in Hollywood these days). But the movie takes forever to start the main story; it seems as if it is half over before Russ and Rusty meet, though the conceit that Rusty dislikes his older self as much as Russ dislikes his younger self is a good one. This premise could have lent itself to some sharp observations about the compromises we make as we get older. Instead it gets increasingly loopy and mawkish as it progresses, trading edge for sentimentality. Topping the whole saccharine concoction off is a truly irritating soundtrack, with weepy strings swelling relentlessly to every twitch or gesture of the actors. It is literally nonstop; the movie does not know the meaning of the word silence.

A good soundtrack should enhance the story (I would go so far as to say that a really good soundtrack should be almost unnoticeable, like good service in a restaurant), but here it drowns the picture with noise. “Disney’s The Kid” is not a terrible picture. It is merely another example of corporate mentality stifling the creative process. The movie tries hard to appeal to both actual kids and adults (probably baby boomers coming to terms with their own disappointments and compromises). In the end, neither group is served particularly well, although this is one picture you can safely take a child to without worrying about anything more objectionable than some nose picking jokes. The movie is nothing if not child friendly, but then I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us at all. (7/12/2000)