The Family Man Blu-ray features mediocre video and decent audio in this mediocre Blu-ray release
Jack Campbell, a successful, talented and single businessman, has everything, or so he thinks. One day he wakes up in a new life where he didn't leave his college girlfriend for a London trip. He's married to Kate, lives in New Jersey and has two kids. Jack's been granted a "glimpse" of a life he might have had. Is there anything there he regrets passing up?
The Family Man is often described as "Capra-esque", but I suspect Frank Capra would have seen
right through it. Capra genuinely believed in the small town virtues of Bedford Falls, whereas the
makers of The Family Man clearly have no taste for the suburban New Jersey existence where
their hero, Jack Campbell, is supposed to discover what's missing from his life. Otherwise, they
wouldn't have to stack the deck by making the alternative to Jack's homey suburban life that of a
cold-hearted Wall Street wheeler-deeler, as if there were nothing in between and no one who
lives an urban existence could possibly fall in love, raise a family or be satisfied emotionally.
Capra, at least, had the intellectual honesty to put his good man, George Bailey, and his bad one,
Mr. Potter, in the same place and time and have them deal with the same people, so that it was
clear that the different outcomes resulted from character, not circumstance.
But for director Brett Ratner and his screenwriters, it all comes down to chance. Take a certain
job, and you wind up a sleek corporate raider who makes everyone work on Christmas. Decline
it, and you end up a harried paterfamilias with a mortgage, a dog, bags under your eyes, a loving
wife and two adorable children. And Ratner's approach has a major drawback. In order to show
you Jack's road-not-taken, he has to plunge Jack into an alternate life with which he isn't familiar
and that Jack, for the most part, finds revolting (bad food, bad clothes, dull job, dumpy
surroundings). Even if you find Jack's discomfiture comical (and I don't), what you have for
much of the film's running time is the hero suffering miserably (and responding with appropriate
criticism) in the very life that's supposed to show him what he missed by opting for success and
comfort.
Capra knew better. As much as George Bailey wants to travel and see the world, Capra made
sure you never doubt that George loves his home town and its people, especially Mary. George
questions his choices only in a moment of desperate crisis, whereas Jack has to have one
manufactured for him by being kidnapped and stuffed into a life he chose not to lead. When he
eventually embraces that life, is he really accepting other possibilities or just surrendering to
Stockholm Syndrome?
"When did this jacket get a halo around it?"
In 1987, a twenty-something Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) and Kate Reynolds (Téa Leoni) say
goodbye at the airport as Jack departs for a one-year internship at a financial firm in England. At
the last minute, Kate asks Jack not to go, because she's afraid they won't survive the year apart.
Jack assures her they love each other, and they'll make it.
Thirteen years later, it's the morning of Christmas Eve, and Jack is bidding goodbye to the
woman with whom he's spent the night. It isn't Kate. (I'll leave the details of the relationship for
first-time viewers to discover, but her name is Paula, and she's played by Amber Valletta.) Jack
lives in an exclusive Upper East Side co-op with an entire room devoted to his clothes. He drives
a Jag and is president of the firm of Lassiter & Company, which is about to close a $130 billion
deal. He has everyone working on Christmas Eve, including his harried underling Bob Cratchit,
er, Alan Mintz (Saul Rubinek). And because this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal, he calls a meeting
for the following afternoon (i.e., Christmas Day).
But in that Jacob Marley, voice-from-the-past style that only happens in Christmas stories, his
loyal secretary Adelle (Mary Beth Hurt) hands him a message from Kate, from whom Jack hasn't
heard in years. Jack doesn't return the call, with the approval of his boss, Peter Lassiter (Josef
Sommer). Instead he decides to walk home on Park Avenue through a light snowfall. Perhaps
because he's feeling not quite himself, Jack intervenes in a dispute between a corner market
owner (Ken Leung) and a character we'll come to know as "Cash" (Don Cheadle), because he's
trying to cash in a winning lottery ticket. As a result Jack gets a gun thrust in his face, but he
calms the situation and ends up walking down the street chatting with Cash.
Who is Cash? The screenwriters are explicit in their commentary that they deliberately left his
identity vague, which is an appropriate decision, because he's a meddlesome jerk. He's certainly
no Clarence sent down from heaven in response to many fervent prayers offered up on behalf of
Jack Campbell. (I doubt anyone, including Jack, thinks he needs help.) No, Cash belongs to some
would-be bunch of do-gooders who go around trying to convince people that, no matter how well they
think they're doing, they could be better. Depending on your predilection, you could analogize
Cash's organization to a government bureaucracy, an environmentalist group or a religious
movement -- but with a lot more clout.
The next morning, Jack wakes up next to Kate in the suburban New Jersey home they appear to
share with their two children, Annie (Makenzie Vega) and Josh (twins Jake and Ryan
Milkovich). They've been married for thirteen years, she's a pro bono lawyer, he's a tire
salesman working for Kate's father (Harve Presnell), and it's Christmas morning -- only Jack
remembers none of this. As far as he knows, he still has a huge business deal to close. Gradually
Jack discovers that Cash & Co. have altered history. Instead of taking the internship in England,
he returned and stayed with Kate. This is the road not taken -- and it sucks. For approximately 80
minutes, we're treated to the sight of Jack floundering around in a world he barely understands,
as he gets lost finding his way home, has to be told by his daughter where he works, doesn't
recognize his best friend, Arnie (Jeremy Piven), gets hit on by the frustrated local wife who's
been after him for years (Lisa Thornhill), can't find his own office at Big Ed's Tires, forgets his
wedding anniversary -- and so on and so on. By the end, even Nicolas Cage, who's an expert at
playing exasperation, has run out of new variations.
Of course, the one good thing in all this mess is that Jack gets to see Kate again, and he also finds
himself warming to the children they might have had. But after a few months, just about the time
he's really starting to get attached to them, Cash yanks him out of this life and puts him back on
Park Avenue, where Jack is astonished to discover that it's still Christmas morning (because the
spirits have done it all in one night, get it?). He goes to the office, where the deal has hit a snag,
but instead of untangling it, he goes looking for Kate. And wouldn't you know it? She's been
living in Manhattan all this time. But she's about to leave for Paris where her law firm is moving
her, and the film ends with Jack persuading her to stay and have coffee long enough for them to
catch up.
On the various commentaries, the filmmakers repeatedly congratulate themselves for their
unsentimental and realistic ending, which would be fine if it weren't for the ridiculously
sentimental and unreal remainder of the film. Yes, hard-charging professionals like Jack and
Kate wouldn't suddenly throw over their careers to run into each other's arms at the end of the
film. But people who become such professionals are hard-wired for type A behavior, and we see
that clearly when Lassiter, Jack's boss from real life, comes into Big Ed's to buy tires, and Jack
turns the encounter into an employment opportunity. People like that don't easily become the
harried suburban caricatures that Ratner and his screenwriters want us to believe Kate and Jack
turned into. They adapt and refocus, and if Wall Street and the city is where they want to be,
that's where they keep aiming. As you sit and watch Cage's Jack cluck with disapproval over the
clothes in his tiny suburban closet or choke on the grocery store food at the neighborhood party,
it's hard to escape the suspicion that the real nightmare being played out here is that of the
Hollywood player, who lives in fear of being one flop (or one missed phone call) away from
being cast out of the penthouse suite and the reserved table at the latest hip restaurant and
returned to whatever mundane slice of Americana he came from. And that isn't Frank Capra's
territory. It's closer to Billy Wilder's.
This 1080p, VC-1-encoded Blu-ray is another disappointing effort from Universal on a catalogue
title. Black levels are good, colors are decently saturated with reasonably accurate fleshtones, and
the source material is in good shape. However, detail is less fully resolved than it should be on a
first-rate Blu-ray image from source material of this vintage. The lack isn't especially noticeable
in close-ups, and it can easily be overlooked in medium shots, but it's hard to miss in long shots,
especially those involving complex cityscapes, crowds of people and/or offices littered with
papers and equipment. Distant objects in the frame are identifiable but indistinct, and anyone
familiar with the camerawork of The Family Man's cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, knows to
expect better results when his anamorphic widescreen photography is properly transferred to
high-definition.
A frequent and unwelcome companion to such a loss of detail is edge enhancement, and that too
is on display here. A particularly severe example occurs in an early scene where Nicolas Cage's
Jack Campbell is running a meeting in a conference room. Jack appears to be wearing two suit
jackets, one made of cloth, the other of ectoplasm. I have included an illustrative screenshot and
a number of others where EE intrudes its unwelcome presence. (You may need to expand the
screenshots to their full size to see it clearly.) Now, I freely admit to being less sensitive to EE
than others, which means that if I noticed it, it must be bad. Still, I found it less distracting on
The Family Man than the lack of detail for which it's supposed to compensate, but since these
problems are really two aspects of the same fault in the transfer, it's six of one, half dozen of the
other.
(Note: I list my equipment on my reviewer page, but for the record, I watched this disc on a 72"
screen from app. 10' away. People who view this disc on a smaller screen (e.g., 36") may not see
these problems, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. Especially in an era where 2K projection
is becoming standard in movie theaters, a Blu-ray that doesn't look equally good when projected
at all sizes is a flawed product.)
There's nothing special about the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. It renders the dialogue clearly and gives
a pleasant musicality to Danny Elfman's score. Foley for such elements as street traffic, office
noises, shopping mall backgrounds and bowling alley sounds comes through effectively, but this
is a front-oriented mix with no sustained effort to immerse you in a surround field. Bass
extension is moderate, as there are no effects that require it to be deep.
The extras have been ported over from the 2004 "collector's edition" DVD. They also appear on
the flip-side DVD version, which replicates the 2004 release. (Universal is re-releasing the 2004
DVD disc in a standalone package with the same cover art as the Blu-ray.) Omitted from the Blu-ray side are the production notes, cast and
filmmaker
bios, DVD-ROM material (including the
script), and "Choose Your Fate" quiz, where answering a series of questions leads to a
generically applicable quotation. However, all of these remain available on the DVD side.
Commentary with Director Brett Ratner and Writers David Diamond and David
Weissman: The director and the two writers talk continuously about all aspects of the
film and its production. Probably because of the presence of the writers, a substantial
proportion focuses on the film's themes. A revealing moment occurs when Ratner notes
that his version of Jack Campbell's "glimpse" is of himself if he hadn't attended NYU
Film School. He'd probably be living at home on his mother's couch making films in his
backyard with friends; instead, he's making big studio movies with Nicolas Cage and Téa
Leoni.
Commentary with Producer Marc Abraham: Near the beginning, Abraham makes a
point of correcting those critics who failed to understand that Jack isn't a Scrooge, but a
good man who is happy with his life. Ratner and the writers urge much the same
interpretation in their commentary. Then again, Scrooge was perfectly content with his
life until Marley's ghost and the three spirits that followed gave him a "glimpse" of his
past, present and future. If Jack Campbell is really so happy with his life, why does his
vivid "dream" of an alternative prompt him to blow off a $130 billion business deal to
spend the evening drinking coffee with an ex-girlfriend he hasn't seen in thirteen years?
Abraham also notes near the end of his commentary that he was asked many times why
they couldn't bring the kids back at the end of the film. His response was always that he'd
be happy to do so, if someone could explain to him whose kids they were.
Isolated Music Score with Commentary by Composer Danny Elfman: Elfman's
comments are so sparse that they're barely a commentary. They occur sporadically at
breaks in the score, but many such breaks contain nothing but dead air. When Elfman
does speak, he focuses on his thematic strategies.
Deleted Scenes (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 13:32): There are nine scenes. One is
especially noteworthy for showing a mother-daughter relationship between Kate and
Annie that is largely absent from the finished film. Another features a brief appearance by
Paul Sorvino as a potential major customer that Big Ed wants to land.
Opening Scene with Alternate Music Track (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 1:14): For a
long time, the film's opening was set to Perry Como's version of "It's Beginning to Look
a Lot Like Christmas". This is that version.
Outtakes (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 8:14): Not the usual blooper reel, but a series of
long, uninterrupted takes in which things keep going wrong (usually, giggle fits).
Spotlight on Location (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 20:01): This is an EPK produced at the
time of the film's release, but it's more informative than the usual EPK, especially on the
subject of how Ratner came to direct the film and how he persuaded Cage to star.
"Hi, Jack" Montage (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 0:40): A series of greetings, edited
together in rapid fire. It looks like something created for a wrap party.
Seal, "This Could Be Heaven" Music Video (SD; 2.35:1, non-enhanced; 5:05): The
song plays during the closing credits.
Theatrical Trailer (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:32): The single best part of the trailer is the
use of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime". The single most misleading part, especially
after listening to the commentaries, is the tagline: "What if you got a second chance?"
Perhaps the greatest sin of The Family Man is that it spends over half its running time getting us
invested in Jack's developing relationship with an adorable moppet named Annie, only to whisk
her permanently out of existence at the end of the film. The equivalent would be discovering, in
an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, that Zuzu doesn't exist, along
with the rest of George's and Mary's kids. As we leave Frank and Kate chatting over coffee and
considering the possibility of picking up where they left off thirteen years ago, you really have to
wonder what's going to happen if they do end up having children together. Will Jack be forever
scanning the faces of those children, looking for some sign of the dream offspring that Cash
showed him? Are Jack's future kids -- not "glimpses", but flesh-and-blood beings who feel,
suffer and have to live with the consequences of their parents' choices -- doomed to see
disappointment in their father's face when he looks in their eyes and doesn't find what he's
expecting? These are not unreasonable questions to consider at the end of a film that is entirely
based on what-ifs and alternative scenarios, and plays fast and loose with all of them.
I'm aware that The Family Man has its fans, and for them it doesn't matter what a reviewer
thinks. For everyone else, I recommend renting first. As far as the Blu-ray's quality is concerned,
definitely rent first.
This October, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release director Brett Ratner's The Family Man on Blu-ray. The holiday dramedy stars Nicolas Cage (Raising Arizona) as a successful Wall Street trader who meets a street-smart angel (Don Cheadle, Out of Sight) ...
