Jodie Foster: A Screen Gem Turns Director

A movie moppet at nine, Jodie Foster went on to become one of Hollywood's most talented actresses. Now, at 28, she has taken a bold directorial leap with Little Man Tate, and it's an audacious winner.

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It's a wise child, or maybe a witch, who knows so precisely and presciently what she wants to do. Acting is Foster's life -- enough of it, at least, to have earned her an Oscar in 1989 for playing the raped party girl in The Accused, and to have won raves and huge audiences for her role as a dogged FBI trainee in The Silence of the Lambs, the third-highest grossing movie released this year. Next year she co-stars in . . . a Woody Allen picture. But right now she is a director, and a damned fine one, of a small-budget film. Little Man Tate is something sensitive with three people: a gifted child (Adam Hann- Byrd), his sympathetic teacher (Dianne Wiest) and the mother, a defiant single parent, torn between love and loss.

One part of Foster's teen prophesy proved timid. She directed herself as the mother. Destiny, if not autobiography, demanded it. Not that this is the Brandy and Jodie Foster story; that would be too simple. It is more aptly an emblem of the strength, intelligence and self-awareness Jodie Foster has applied to ensure that a perishable commodity (actor) becomes a lasting presence. The movie can stand as both an artful commentary on growing up strange and a calling-card film for a director who promises much and delivers most of it. Still, reverberations from Foster's extraordinary youth pulse through Scott Frank's script and inform the fierce care the director took in realizing it.

When he was a year old, Fred Tate could read the insignia on the back of a dish. At seven he is a displaced person, a brilliant adult mind imprisoned in second grade. In class he flummoxes his teacher with complex answers to simple questions. (Q. Which of the numbers one through nine can be divided by two? A. All of them.) On the schoolyard asphalt he draws elaborate Madonnas in colored chalk. But he can't catch a basketball without falling down, or fail to be oppressed by his genius. Seems Fred is a kid too, envying the boy's ease of one rowdy, popular classmate: "All I want is someone I can eat lunch with." He's a Mozart in awe of Bart Simpson.

Fred is mature enough to have a child of his own, and in a way, he does: his mother Dede. Coarse and loving, she waits tables in a Chinese lounge to support herself and her son with no help, thank you, from the long-departed Mr. Tate. ("Dede says I don't have a dad," Fred notes in the film's narration. "She says I'm the Immaculate Conception. That's a pretty big responsibility for a little kid.") They are a sublime mismatch of the sort usually found only in marriages. Fred balances Mom's checkbook and, as a Mother's Day gift, writes her an opera. Dede brags, like a tough schoolkid, about how she aced out some fastidious jerk in her basement laundry. For her, chain letters are literature. The boy, a nonstop reader, also dotes on Van Gogh's flower studies. Sometimes, Fred says, "I wake up in his paintings."

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