Jack

Rating:
Summary: Good script and an excellent cast
Review: Jack is a fifteen year-old boy dealing with the difficult navigation through adolescence. To further complicate his life his parents divorce because his father is gay. Jack's once secure world is turned upside down.

The movie has a well-written script and good performances from the excellent cast. Veteran actors Stockard Channing and Ron Silver play the parents. Jack is played by Anton Yeltsin, who was actually only thirteen when the movie was made. His sensitive performance in the title role is what really makes the story work.

Though nothing profound, this is an offbeat and better than average coming of age story.


Rating:
Summary: A Good Story in Search of a Good Lead Actor
Review: JACK is a good film: the story is sound (although strangely naive in today's informed youth culture), the topic is timely, the acting by Stockard Channing and Ron Silver is excellent, but the total impact fails because of the consistently flat performance by Anton Yelchin as the lead character Jack.

Anne (Stockard Channing) and Paul (Ron Silver) are divorcing in a primarily civilized way. The reason for the dissolution of this previously happy family unit is kept secret from 15 year old Jack (Anton Yelchin) who has to find out from his high school friends in a rather demeaning way that his father is gay and has a gay lover. Despite Paul's attempts to maintain an amicable relationship with Anne and his children he is unable to accept his own sexuality to the extent that he attempts to closet his true persona. Once through that phase he encourages Jack to be with him and his lover Bob (Paul McGillian) but nothing assuages Jack's resentment of his father's "deserting" him and his mother.

Jack's refuge is in his friend Max Burka (Giacomo Baessato) and in the girl Jack desires - Maggie (Brittany Irvin)- whose father is openly gay and just happens to be good friends with Jack's father. The manner in which Anne, Paul, and Jack come to terms with the new life that impacts them all is the point of the story. And it is to the writer's credit that the ending is not simply pat.

Stockard Channing finds just the right amount of compassion and rage in her role of the mother who must cope with the changes in her happy life and Ron Silver manages to avoid all the tired mannerisms that usually befall the 'new gay dad' role. Anton Yelchin is a good young actor: he simply is not credible in a role that invites credibility. Grady Harp, December 2004

Rating:
Summary: After school special
Review: There were some good ideas here and some good acting. Channing does her usual fine work and Silver manages to avoid being too sensitive. The whole film really depends on the character of Jack and I'm afraid Anton Yelchin can't pull it off. He has a strangely disconnected affect, almost as if he were practicing for a self-deprecating stand-up routine about his kooky family. His pain never becomes believable and so the piece mostly moves by and you wind up observing it, but no more than that.