(3 of 7)
He confides this to Jane Grierson, who runs a school for gifted kids. A former prodigy, Jane can appreciate what Fred has to give; she can empathize with his anguish, isolation, nightmares. She will protect him, nurture him -- mother him, if he and Dede give her half a chance. Thus begins a kind of custody battle between the two women, each offering part of what Fred needs. Dede is heart, Jane is mind; Dede is sense, Jane sensibility. Neither is a whole number: Dede spits out cherry pits faster than she does ideas, and Jane bakes a meat loaf that looks like a moon rock. The movie asks, How many mothers can divide a boy's loyalty? And the answer is, Both of them. But is there an answer? A child can't choose who cares for him.
In the wrong hands, this material could get pretty twee and reductive; give the kid a disease, and you have a TV movie of the week. And, in fact, the second half of Little Man Tate threatens to take sides, to turn Jane into an exploitative klutz, to provide a happy, even triumphant solution to the dilemma, full of hats and horns and two birthday cakes. But, really, that's just dessert to a film that offers much chewy food for thought. The comforting dream of communion at the end can't erase the picture's careful wit about good people in desperate situations or, especially, the wan isolation shadowing a boy who knows his genius has made him alien. Says French filmmaker Louis Malle: "Jodie's film is basically about the profound loneliness of childhood, and she's dealt with it head-on. I would be very happy and proud to have made the film that she did."
Foster would be happy and proud to hear that; Malle's Murmur of the Heart is among her favorite pictures and one of the inspirations for Little Man Tate. ; The perpetual film student, who at Yale wrote a paper on Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, still believes that French directors go "for the truth of a scene. This movie is my first statement, and I wanted a French film sense." That means not rushing or spoon-feeding the audience, not forcing easy moral judgments through camera effects or the placement of actors in the frame. This is not, in Foster's words, "a $20 million nightmare"; her directorial hand does not conceal a joy buzzer. She caresses each movie moment as if it were privileged.
Little Man Tate isn't all French. It speaks with a distinctly American accent; it saunters where a French film might slouch. Foster has worked for some superfine American directors -- among them Martin Scorsese (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver), Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) -- and this movie indicates that she paid attention. A pool-hall montage, all slow-mo and Saturn-ringed balls and electric-blue vectors, plays like a fast tribute to Scorsese's The Color of Money.
At heart, though, this movie isn't an homage to anybody. Foster has her own confident style, her own cinema craft to create a world that is both familiar and unique. The look is cool and bright for Jane's scenes (she's the perky techno-mom), and warmer but tarnished for Dede's. The apartment Dede and Fred live in is a domestic mess bathed in an autumnal glow -- as if they lived inside a jack-o'-lantern and its teeth were the boy's cage.