Photo Gallery
This is largely due to the fact that it features the breakout performance of an actor named Tom Hanks. At the time, Hanks had only had a few leading roles -- chiefly Bachelor Party and Splash -- and none of them had really given him much of anything to play with. As Josh Baskin, however, there was complexity and depth to consider. Josh is, at the start of the film, a semi-popular 14-year-old (David Moscow) who gets put out when he realizes Cynthia Benson has an older boyfriend, not to mention he's not tall enough for the Whirl-A-Gig. At the edge of the carnival, he finds a Zoltar machine, a mysterious little game that promises to fulfill one's wishes. Josh requests something simple: 'I want to be big.'
To the shock of Josh and his mother (Mercedes Ruehl), he awakes the next morning as Mr. Hanks in, what I imagine are, excruciatingly tight briefs. His best friend Billy (Jared Rushton) trusts he is who he says he is after they duet on their secret song and whisks him off to Manhattan to help him track down the Zoltar machine to return to smallness. A waiting time of over six weeks means that Josh will have to do that which we all dread: get a job. He begins as a simple data clerk at MacMillan Toys but, thanks to his legendary romp in FAO Schwartz with the CEO (Robert Loggia), he quickly becomes VP of market development and catches the eye of fellow exec Susan (a very good Elizabeth Perkins).
Besides proving that, in fact, Robert Loggia is not useless and that Penny Marshall can, apparently, make a great film, Big ponders hefty concepts without being too hokey or pretentious about it. There are, of course, certain clichés and benchmarks that, perhaps unavoidably, show up, but they are handled with a sense of humor and nimble craftsmanship. Is adulthood about losing one's imagination and gaining overwhelming responsibility? Are there any simple answers to not becoming a dull windbag by the age of 30 besides becoming a derelict? These are not by any stretch of the imagination minor questions, and in its own way, Big sets up the even bigger questions that would be brought up in 'kid's' movies to come, notably the Toy Story films and Brad Bird's magnificent The Incredibles.
Soon enough, Billy tracks down the Zoltar machine and Susan begins to wonder if they are more than just a fling. Marshall sharply handles story and pacing, but her most intelligent decision is to keep things focused on Hanks, who has rarely been funnier and reveals himself, for the first time, as a perceptive and nuanced performer. Seeing Josh's breakdown in the St. James Hotel as his neighbor screams was, for a young movie fan at the age of eight, some sort of miracle. And that's what Big continues to be a little over two decades after its initial release: a miraculous work dressed in a critic-proof vest.
