Seeing life through a child’s eyes

There’s something magical about Disney films that tugs at the heart and leaves one feeling good about the world. The Kid is one such film and I consider it my favorite Disney movie.

Russ Duritz (Bruce Willis) is an egotistical image-consultant who enjoys bossing important people around. He minces no words in expressing his clients’ faults, often embarrassing them in front of others. His haughtiness encompasses his personal life as he displays the same arrogance to the two closest people that could pass for friends, his associate "Amy" (Emily Mortimer) and his secretary Janet (Lily Tomlin). He would not even spend time with his aging father when the latter visits Russ to invite him for dinner. For Russ, the world revolves around him and everybody else’s self-worth depends on his image-enhancing insight.

Russ is jolted from his complacency when he awakens one evening and comes face to face with Rusty, his chubby, snotty-nosed, eight-year-old self. After recovering from the initial shock and finally accepting that Rusty is not a hallucination, Russ takes the kid and sets out to transform little Rusty from the pathetic loser he perceives his young self to be.

It’s funny how the word "success" takes an entirely different meaning through the eyes of an eight-year- old. For Russ, it means graduating on top of his class, driving a fancy car, wearing an expensive suit, telling people what to do and being held in high regard by society. For young Rusty, success simply means having a wife and a dog and flying an airplane.

Soon, eight-year-old Rusty meets Amy and the two hit it off, leaving Russ disgusted. He wonders what Amy sees in the clumsy eight-year-old mop-head. Here he is, a successful professional who has managed to bury his childhood and now he faces the very thing he had hated about himself. Rusty, on the other hand, can’t understand why Russ is not even engaged to this charming woman. One evening, Rusty sets out to do what his older self never got around to do. He proposes marriage to Amy. Russ moves in, scoots out the boy from the "embarrassing" scene and gets into an argument with Amy. He ponders the real reason behind this strange encounter with his eight-year-old self. Is he there to teach the boy something or is the boy trying to make him realize something else? He figures the only way to get Rusty back to his time is for Russ to re-live his childhood.

Russ identifies an event during his eighth birthday when he got into a fight with one of the school bullies. He ends up in the principal’s office and is let off the hook by his terminally-ill mother. When his father learns about the incident, he comes down hard on little Rusty and blames him for his mother’s condition. The father forbids his son from crying and admonishes him to grow up. After a few months, Rusty’s mother dies and he grows up feeling guilty about her death.

The film made me realize the huge responsibility that parents have in the development of their children. Whether we realize it or not, everything we say or do leaves a lasting impact in their young minds that could spell a difference in their future. Rusty feared his father although he wanted badly to please him. That encounter with his father changed Rusty’s life. He made up for his perceived failure by pursuing academic excellence. And although he did well in school, it was at the expense of giving up the things that really mattered in life.

The film also helped me evaluate my priorities. As parents, it’s easy to get too involved with things grown-up people consider as important. We get preoccupied with work that we often forget its purpose–that is, to provide a decent future for our children. However, it is not only their future that we must consider but also their present. More than material comfort, what our children need is our time and attention. . .here and now. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be in that situation where I’ll work my head off preparing for my children’s future only to wake up one morning to find them all grown up without a hint of the kind of person they have become.

Like most Disney films, The Kid ends on a happy note. Russ accepts his father back into his life, marries Amy, gets a dog and flies off to the sunset to live out his childhood dream.

The Kid reminded me of the importance of being true to one’s self. Rusty defined an image-consultant as someone who "helps people lie about who they are so they can pretend to be someone who they really aren’t." Sometimes, it takes a child to make us realize our follies. We cannot find true happiness trying to impress people all the time. Only by being true to the child within can we discover who we really are and become the person we are called to be.

Surely, our own corner of the world will be the better for it.