The Travolta/Cage Project #61 The Family Man (2000)
I am perpetually gob-smacked by the audacity and hypocrisy of Hollywood redemption fantasies where A-list talent that couldn’t imagine life without personal assistants, servants and at least a few million in the bank lend their expensive time and talent to morality tales that preach that in a capitalist society like ours no one knows true happiness like someone with five kids who makes thirty thousand dollars a year teaching English in an economically depressed small town.
Jack Campbell, the protagonist of the 2000 redemption fantasy The Family Man, begins the movie having a life I imagine is not terribly dissimilar from the folks who wrote, directed, produced, green-lit and starred in it.
Like Jack at the start of the film, when he is a hard-charging Wall Street executive with a sleek penthouse, a closet full of designer suits, a sports car and an endless succession of model-gorgeous conquests, the show business slicksters who made The Family Man have money, power and glamorous big city jobs that put them at the very apex of the socioeconomic ladder.
Then again it’s not as if The Family Man director Bret Ratner doesn’t know the travails of the common man. Why, when he moved out to Hollywood to become one of our top paid and least respected directors, Ratner had to stay in Robert Evans’ guest house for months while he looked for a mansion to call his own.
The struggle, as the young people say, is real.
Through a curiously, poorly explained twist of fate, and the intervention of a Magical Negro named Cash played by Don Cheadle, Jack ends up living a life the movie, and Hollywood in general, see as emblematic of the banal but deeply satisfying existence of the rubes and suckers in the audience.
The former master of the universe now sells tires for his father in law Big Ed in New Jersey and has a wife, two kids, including one who is the kind of freakishly precocious moppet Hollywood loves and audiences grudgingly tolerate, and a dog.
This is a Hollywood fantasy, of course, so living the humdrum life of a modest everyman entails being married to a woman who looks like the movie star (Tea Leoni) playing her instead of satiating your sexual urges with a never-ending series of one-night stands.
The Family Man asks what it imagines is a pointed and ultimately profound question in, “Wouldn’t you rather not have money or fame or power or the ability to realize your dreams rather than have all of those things and sometimes wonder if maybe there’s something more?”
As much as I love being a humble everyman with a wife and two kids and a dog who ekes out a modest living writing about movies like The Family Man I gotta say that money, power, fame and the ability to realize my dreams all sound real fucking good, particularly if I don’t need to give up my wife and kids in the process.
The Family Man actually opens with a prologue that takes place 13 years earlier than the rest of the action, which regrettably means having to buy a thirty-six year old Cage as a 23 year old fresh out of college and eager to begin his life and career.
Jack is hopelessly in love with his girlfriend Kate (Leoni) and assumes that their bond will survive a year apart when he scores a highly sought after internship in London. The college lovebirds break up and Jack becomes a fabulously successful businessman with an eye for the ladies and the finer things in life.
Jack is living the Maxim dream. Ladies love him. His coworkers and neighbors find him delightful. He’s a hotshot executive about to close a multi-billion dollar deal. He can buy anything he wants.
But is he happy? Yes, deliriously so, apparently! But this is a Hollywood fantasy so naturally our hero deserves more than money, power, sex, glamour and happiness. He deserves, or rather will be forced to earn through spiritual growth, true happiness. We all know that true happiness can only be found selling tires in New Jersey and looking like you cut your own hair and buy your clothes at a Sears going out of business sale.
Jack begins the movie a tame, PG-13 version of the yuppie predator he unforgettably played in Vampire’s Kiss. He’s a kinder, gentler New York shark whose primary problems seem to be that Christmas means nothing to him—an unforgivable sin in movies like this—and he’s so focussed on professional success that his ambition blinds him to everything else in life.
One fateful Christmas Eve Jack stumbles upon Cheadle’s angelic interloper trying to cash a lottery ticket and ends up buying the ticket from him after the cashier rejects it as a forgery.
This somehow leads to Jack waking up the next morning alongside Kate and discovering, to his utter horror and mortification, that he’s no longer a titan of industry but rather a poorly dressed husband and father in New Jersey squandering his innate genius for business selling tires for his father in law.
Jack at first freaks the fuck out about his new life, seeing it as a permanent acid trip and form of hell. He spends a fair amount of The Family Man’s obscenely generous two hour runtime trying to explain to everyone around him that a terrible mix-up has been made and that he’s actually a super-rich businessman in Manhattan and everyone dismisses him, including Kate.
If my wife were to tell me that a terrible mistake had been made and that she wasn’t my wife at all, and that she had to return to her real life as a single, high-powered businesswoman I would assume that she’s either had a complete break from reality and needed psychological help or that everything I knew about how the world works was wrong.
Not Kate or any of Jack’s pals. They just kind of laugh it off so that Jack can go about the business of learning valuable life lessons. I never understood the rules that governed The Family Man’s fantasy universe. Even more frustratingly, the filmmakers don’t seem to know the rules of its world either and seem to be making them up as they go along.
Jack at first tries to understand the mystery of who he is in this alternate timeline and how he got there. Then he begins to accept that being married to the love of his life really wouldn’t be that bad, even if it meant giving up the decadent pleasures of his old life.
One of Cage’s great gifts as a movie star as well as an actor is the strong chemistry he shares with his female leads. That’s true of The Family Man as well. That The Family Man is able to get us to care at all about the romance at its core is a minor miracle that has everything to do with Cage and Leoni’s charm and personal magnetism and nothing to do with the oppressively artificial and sentimental film they’re trapped in.
Late in the film Jack watches an old videocassette of himself singing “'La, La, La Means I Love You” to Kate at a backyard birthday party. It’s a sequence that goes on and on and on as Cage croaks his way painfully through pretty much the entire song.
It’s pure romantic comedy hokum, something we’ve seen over and over again but Cage sells it with wholehearted conviction and heartbreaking earnestness. Onscreen and off Cage is a true romantic given to outsized gestures of love and bold sincerity.
The Family Man’s half-assed fantasy conceit calls for Jack to become emotionally invested in his relationship with his theoretical children in his New Jersey family life, which invites the question of what happens to them when he snaps back into his old life at the end, having learned that having a monogamous relationship with your soulmate is better than anonymous sex with models, in the long run at least.
Do our hero’s theoretical children disappear like characters in a dream? Or do they live on in some weird multiverse? I have no idea but Jack is eventually rewarded for not only accepting but actively embracing a new, modest family life by getting to return to his old existence.
The Family Man is a Christmas movie like every other, an empty exercise in formula and fake uplift distinguished by fine lead performances and a sleek look courtesy of cinematographer Dante Spinotti, a two time Oscar nominee and frequent Michael Mann and Curtis Hanson collaborator.
The Family Man is a Christmas movie that forgets it’s a Christmas movie about 90 percent of the time as well as a movie so aggressively undistinguished that I saw it this morning, podcasted about it this afternoon, wrote about it this evening and will have forgotten about it by tomorrow.
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