LITTLE MAN TATE
With Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodie Foster, Dianne Wiest, Harry Connick Jr., David Pierce, Debi Mazar, and P.J. Ochlan.
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The title hero is a boy genius named Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd) who occasionally narrates his own story, which transpires mainly between his seventh and eighth birthdays. He’s gifted in so many ways that, at least on the schematic level of Scott Frank’s script, he often seems like several boy geniuses jammed together: a self-taught reader by age one, he also quickly reveals himself to be a talented visual artist, a remarkable classical pianist, an original and accomplished poet, and a mathematical wizard who breezes through a college course in quantum physics when he’s seven. Since the movie doesn’t seem to be science fiction, we can only regard these oversize credentials as some massive instance of Hollywood wish fulfillment. However, virtually every Hollywood movie involves wish fulfillment on at least as massive a scale; Little Man Tate differs mainly by shifting the focus of its fantasy. Instead of the perfect romance, perfect summer, perfect orgy of destruction, perfect home, or perfect murder, this picture simply postulates a perfect little boy.
Significantly, Eddie is the only adult male who plays an important emotional role in Fred’s life–and his role is extremely short-lived, consisting of one afternoon of hanging out together. But the film never posits the absence of a father figure as a serious factor in Fred’s upbringing. Indeed, the only patriarchal figure who comes to mind is a ludicrously myopic and insensitive stuffed shirt: an upper-crust “cultural” TV talk-show host named Winston F. Buckner (George Plimpton) who registers as a parody of William F. Buckley. Fred at one point in his narration solemnly conveys his mother’s apparently frivolous claim that he was the product of immaculate conception; and at no point does Dede express or even hint at any intention to marry (or remarry). The implication that Fred can get along fine without a father or a father surrogate is the most radical idea this movie has to offer–but it’s an idea that’s implicit rather than expounded.
Foster’s sense of camera placement is both original and highly functional throughout, from the opening shot–an overhead angle of Dede with her newborn baby that slowly descends in a spiral motion–to the climactic moment in the movie’s penultimate scene when Jane’s decision not to intervene between Dede and Fred is dramatized by her out-of-focus silhouette appearing in and then disappearing from a lit doorway in medium long shot, without the nudging emphasis of a close-up. When it serves her story, Foster doesn’t hesitate to have the camera retreat from a window that frames Dede dancing with Fred in their flat, or even to position it inside an oven to observe Jane triumphantly pulling out a meat loaf. She has the imagination to vividly enter Fred’s mind for two brief but lively fantasies (involving numbers and billiard balls) and two eerily succinct nightmares, and the control in another sequence to purposefully oscillate between film and video. I can only hope she gets the chance to direct more movies, because this is a remarkable first effort.
