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But as Susan drops her tough shell and becomes more like a child, Josh becomes more like an adult, hard and ambitious. A suit replaces his jeans, a businessman's shoes his sneakers, and he begins worrying about grownup things like marketing reports. He no longer has time to play with Billy, who alone has shared his secret. Stalking out of the toy tycoon's office, Billy reminds Josh that he is three months older and that Josh is still really a boy. The bittersweet ending is the film's only real disappointment, perhaps too predictable, too lacking in surprise and invention.
Yet the wonder is that the scriptwriters, Anne Spielberg and Gary Ross, have, until then, always steered in the right direction, avoiding the wrong turns that are so easy to make in such an insubstantial fantasy. Penny Marshall's directing style is one of understatement, and she sets a tone of instant nostalgia that only occasionally descends to the sentimental. The casting is just about perfect. For an adult to play a child is probably more difficult even than for an actor with 20/20 vision to play a blind man; it requires a whole new way of looking, talking and thinking. But Hanks, who emerges from this film as one of Hollywood's top comic actors, is both believable and touching as a boy lost in a grownup world.
Perkins is equally skillful in the only slightly less demanding role of a woman who falls in love with a man who is a boy trying to act like a man. Loggia, who played the down-at-the-heels detective in Jagged Edge, gives his toy-company president just the right kindly-cranky edge. But the true star, after Hanks himself, is Rushton, as the best friend who tries to bring Josh back to the real world -- or so Hollywood would like us to believe -- of childhood and innocence and unrequited puppy love.