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Community Corner

Movies Made Here: The Family Man (2000)

A limited-run feature, biweekly reviewing the movies – major, minor, indie, cult, classic – with scenes filmed in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.

It’s hard to sympathize with the plight of the The Family Man (Nicolas Cage as Jack Campbell) when he wakes up from a life that gave him pleasure (Manhattan bachelor pad with giant walk-in closets, model girlfriends, Ferrari) to a life that is supposed to provide fulfillment (beautiful wife and kids, cute house in the ‘burbs, minivan).

Perhaps we finally get his struggle to adjust to this new life he entered on Christmas morning à la It’s a Wonderful Life when he shows up at the sole location in this movie filmed in Sleepy Hollow, Big Ed’s Tires. “You mean I sell tires. That’s what I do?” Jack asks his (sudden) daughter when she tells him where he works. "I'm a tire salesman." The little girl shrugs.

Big Ed’s Tires sits at the bend of Route 9 when it dips down in Sleepy Hollow. Now there is an new office complex on the spot , adjacent to the entrance to Weber Park and across the street from and River Rock Supply. The set designers transformed what was an empty car dealership into this very believable tire shop, complete with ridiculously large painted sign – surely this would never fly with Village Code – of Big Ed in a 10-gallon hat. Big Ed, to make matters worse, is Jack’s father-in-law.

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Inside, Jack escapes the dropped-ceiling fluoresce of the sales room (where the large glass windows reveal the cars curving around that accident-prone bend) to his private back office (the actual office of this place). He digs around here for details of this new life: a dismal check book, a depleted bottle of Glenlivet in the desk drawer, family photos and child-drawn pictures, faux wood paneling galore, giant computer, a tire poster, and a plaque awarding him 1988 Sales Associate at E.F. Hutton. That was the year he broke up with his girlfriend and went to London to assume his successful bachelor life. He realizes now in this alternate married/tire life, that he never went to London. This girlfriend is now his wife.

This wife, Téa Leoni, is a movie wife for sure, a conjured male fantasy. Just a little too perfect for my taste – so forgiving, cheerful and sexy despite the fact that her husband is acting like a total freak. As my husband pointed out though, what might seem freaky husband behavior to the viewer could come across to the wife as mere midlife crisis. While Jack knows she’s perfect and the kids are too, he longs for more…he wants his old life and this life. So he tries to combine things by winning back his old job in the city, an opportunity that arises from a second scene at the tire shop when a former colleague rolls in on his flat-tire Bentley and Jack wows him with his business acumen.

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Luckily, the ending doesn’t reward Jack with life in the suburbs but a chance to do something more with this “glimpse” he was given. Suddenly, he’s back in the city, back as a bachelor, and he contacts the old ex-girlfriend who he talks out of flying away to Paris that night just to have a cup of coffee. The ambivalence, and even sadness, of the just-having-a-cup-of-coffee end is pleasing.

“Wall Street, Main Street, all it’s all just a bunch of people waking up in the morning and trying to figure out how the hell they’re going to get their kids through college. It’s all just people," Jack realizes.

But Cage apparently didn’t want to be in a corny movie, so the creators had to edgy the film up a bit more to attract him. It might have helped that the Ferrari they used just happened to be Cage’s former Ferrari. The minivan, however, was not.       

(You can see Big Ed's ridiculous sign on our Sleepy Hollow building in this YouTube trailer attached.)

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