TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 20.5 KB | 424 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 68

COVER STORIES

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.

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and
Linda Williams/New York


    The rest of us have family albums to remind us of what we
looked like in youth. Jodie Foster could have a movie library
and a stack of press clippings. Because she has been an actress
for 25 of her 28 years, she can screen the public record of her
childhood. Anyone can. You can re-view her evolution from
tadpole to tomboy and beyond: in the Coppertone commercial, the
Disney pictures, the sitcoms, Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone. And you
can scan the interviews she gave to magazines from age 11
onward. Dear reader, we have in our possession a tape of a
lunchroom chat you had in seventh grade. Care to hear what you
said? Care to be held to it?

    Foster could pass this test because she was always a
bright young woman as well as a symbol of precocious girlhood.
At seven, she had entered Los Angeles' Lycee Francais, where she
would perfect her French and emerge as valedictorian before
heading off to Yale. So the child star could be expected to have
thoughts, and to turn thoughts into sentences. Even today her
teen talk is worth attending to, as another kind of Jodie Foster
retrospective.

    On acting: "People assume I've been robbed of my
childhood. I don't think that's true. I've gotten something
extra. Most kids, all they have is school. That's why they get
so mad when it's boring and feel so bad if they fail. I have my
work; I know how to talk to adults and how to make a decision.
Acting has spared me from being a regular everyday kid slob. I
used to think of it as just a job, but now it's my whole life,
it's all I want to do."

    On sisterhood: "My friendships with girls usually don't
last too long. I'm not interested in a lot of the things they
are, I guess." On femininity: "I never had the gift of looking
cute. I hate dresses and jewelry, and the only doll I played
with was a G.I. Joe. And I've got this deep voice. That's why
they call me Froggy at school."

    On her mother Brandy, a single parent: "She always
listened to me. She thought of me as her best friend. If it
weren't for me, she wouldn't have anything, and if it weren't
for her, I would be nothing." Being raised without a father was
"the best thing that ever happened to me. I never realized there
was any difference between men and women. It never occurred to
me I would have to be a nurse and not a doctor."

    On directing: "It would be great to be a director. They
get to do anything! They have people killed, blow things up,
make people cry and laugh. Directing is just like creating
life." "It is a very masculine thing to do; they all end up in
the hospital after a picture. It's a hard job." She said she
hoped to start with a small-budget film. "Something sensitive
with two people." She was determined, though, not to appear in
a film she also directed. "That is the biggest mistake, unless
you're Woody Allen."

    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."

    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.

    The movie screen is a cage too. Animal instincts are on
display in there, prowling for our pleasure. Handsome creatures
(the performers) assume the shapes of pretty beasts (the
characters). Being observed through these gilded bars, in brutal
or glamorous close-up, has to be confining for a film actor. The
mixture of exhibitionism and vulnerability in any performer must
be volatile, toxic. Even more so for an actress, since the
history of movies, as has been said a million times, is the
history of men looking at women. And most certainly for a child
starlet who, at first, is utterly spontaneous, innocent, exposed
-- often exploited and, perhaps, as isolated as Fred Tate.

    Foster says she directed the Little Man Tate script
"because I understood it so much." How could she not? She was
an exceptional child from the age of three, when she shot her
first Coppertone commercial. She was in TV shows and movies at
nine: a beautiful blond girl, her sad eyes overwhelming a
toothsome smile. She was Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer's muse of
civility, and Addie Pray, beguiling con artist of the Paper Moon
series, and a one-kid sorority of spunky Disney heroines. How
many girls of the '70s wanted to be Jodie Foster? Movie stars
are to fall in love with. Or, if they are children, to adopt.
How many parents wanted to trade in their daughters for this
one?

    It takes a smart heart and the carapace of an armadillo to
emerge sane, let alone healthy, from child celebrity. Jodie
Foster somehow did it, and the somehow is her mother. Brandy,
a former publicist, separated from Lucius Foster III, a real
estate agent, before their fourth child, Alicia Christian
(Jodie), was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 19, 1962. The atypical
stage mother, Brandy won Jodie's loving respect because she
urged and loved rather than pushed and shoved. "She'd seen a lot
of wayward souls in Hollywood. She didn't want a cripple for a
child; she wanted me to fly. She also wanted me to have a
serious and heroic career. So she chose some risky, off-beat
movies."

    In any kind of movie, Jodie was off-beat because from
girlhood she always seemed the older woman. Not yet 10, playing
Becky Thatcher, she instructs the young truant in the meaning
of the word philanderer. A year or so later, as wizened Audrey
in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she shows Alice's son how
to steal guitar strings from a music store, asks him if he wants
to get high on Ripple, and nonchalantly reveals that her "mom
turns tricks in the Ramada Inn from 3 on in the afternoon." Not
long after Alice, she was Tallulah, a sleek gun moll, in Bugsy
Malone, Alan Parker's weird-but-it-works munchkin musical. The
same year she played Iris, Taxi Driver's notorious pre-teen
hooker -- rude talk and skimpy clothes ill-suiting a good girl
stranded in hell. And with each new movie, it seemed as if Jodie
had skipped another grade. Her intelligence gave her a
precocious maturity; the Foster child was already a Foster
parent.

    Even for Jodie, so spookily poised on- and offscreen,
growing pains appeared inevitable. Everyone passes through an
awkward stage, and for many child stars that stage is adulthood.
They seem like less perfect versions of their lost miniature
selves. Their cuteness is shed, and with it their earning power.
At 16 they can be obsolete. Many aging child actors, once
sprung from the pampered captivity of, say, sitcom stardom, are
as unready for real life as zoo pets suddenly released in the
wild. They try, too quickly, to catch up on the rambunctious
youth they missed, and wind up in the police blotter or on the
cover of supermarket tabloids. They can spend their 20s torpid,
discarded, in rehab from their early fame.

    If any child star could escape the Hollywood hothouse and
blossom, it would be Jodie Foster. And indeed she considers when
she was 18 to 24, "the years I went off to college and had a
life." She armored herself in friends, cocooned herself in the
anonymity of a newly plump figure, tangled with the
deconstructionist teachers in her comp-lit classes at Yale.

    But someone else was flipping through her movie family
album. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot President
Reagan and subsequently professed his love for Foster -- or,
really, for Iris in Taxi Driver. (The film was based in part on
the diary of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of Governor
George Wallace.) Hinckley won the prize any deranged, unrequited
lover seeks: he would be forever linked with his unknowing
inamorata.

    Foster could speak eloquently of the rank underside of
stargazing -- of fandom fanned into fanaticism. Understandably,
she does not speak on the subject (just last week she canceled
an appearance on the Today show because Hinckley was to be
mentioned), or on other aspects of her personal life. She knows
that Hollywood movies are all about the marketing of emotion,
and that it is difficult for actors, the onscreen vessels of
emotion, to keep their lives sensible and their sensations
private. Nonetheless, Foster is determined to separate public
persona from private person.

    She hopes that moviegoers will do the same. "My work is my
work," she says. "It has always been a way to express myself,
and to be things I'm not. My character precedes my job. I was
who I was before I became an actress. I became an actress
because I like to act, not to get my picture in the paper and
have people wonder what color socks I wear -- not to be able to
get the best table at the Polo Lounge or to be good friends with
Barry Diller."

    Foster graduated (cum laude) from Yale in 1985. But at
that time Diller, chairman of 20th Century Fox, was probably
not much interested in being good friends with her, or casting
her in a movie. She wasn't box-office poison; she was
box-office invisible. Another actress's hope was her fear: that
she might end up as a regular on The Bold Ones. "My career was
at a low point when I graduated," she notes, "but I couldn't let
it go without a real push. Then it struck me that I wasn't going
to do dreck," and she took roles in some eccentric good films
(Siesta, Five Corners) and at least one ordinary bad one
(Stealing Home). Then The Accused came along. Or rather, she
stormed after it. The part got her the Oscar and a place on the
actresses' A list. Only fitting: A is the grade she has earned
all her life, in class and onscreen.

    As an actress-director, she knows her subject. She could
teach Hollywood to moguls; they might learn something. "This is
not a business that is kind to women, but it needs them," she
says. "The female pioneers have to be 10 times better than a
man. Maybe someday there will be an old-girl network. But I'm
not interested in alienating the audience. I believe in the
system. I'm acutely conscious of the business in this town and
how I organize my career. As an actor you must have
self-knowledge and an understanding of your limits. I know I
can't play a Chicano gang leader, but I could play Queen
Victoria. I'm also a structure hound. If the choices are too
great, I'm paralyzed."

    She is never paralyzed; she is always prepared, whether
playing a scene or carrying a film. The ferocious focus has
always been there. When she was 13, she directed a short "tone
poem," Hands of Time, a series of shots of hands that depict
life from cradle to old age: a baby, a couple getting married,
a man cocking a rifle, a man's hand on a pregnant woman's
stomach, and an old man holding hands with a little kid. In one
day, she had to write the treatment for it, select the cast,
direct the crew, and decide on the editing order. Foster
remembers the film as "lyrical, very pretty."

    As director of Tate, she amassed storyboard details on
each scene -- not just the camera blocking but the underlying
emotions of each character. "Films are too important not to have
a drawn road map," she says. "I won't wing it. When I come into
a shot, I always have an idea." She has an idea too of the
field-marshalry of directing a movie. "You must learn to lead,
to be a benevolent king. You try to communicate your vision and
monitor those who don't get it. I feel safe there. I can be
vulnerable. The code is, they'll catch you if you fall down. I
have camaraderie with these people. It's like going through a
war together."

    By all accounts, there was no war between the Tates.
Foster made sure it was a happy set; everybody watched the
rushes; the young boss won new acolytes, none stronger than
screenwriter Frank, who had hoped to direct the movie. "There's
no one in this town like her," says Frank. "She seems small and
sad; you want to protect her. Then you find she's a pretty and
intelligent woman who knows kick boxing. She's one of the few
people who's not tongue-lashed in the business. This town is the
biggest collection of dips, dopes and dunderheads. Most are
illiterate; their entire vocabulary can be summed up in MTV. But
Jodie's resourceful. She knows movies, but she knows more than
movies. She's unpretentious -- 99% of the time she dresses in
sweats. And she's maternal; she eats healthy and tells you how
to eat."

    What she told the actors is a collegial secret, except for
her instructions to young Adam Hann-Byrd. "Adam is a very
realistic kid, very aware," she says. "I wouldn't know how to
direct a kid to be that way. So I'd load him up with a lot of
technical things -- kids usually connect with the technical --
and then he would just relax. Or I'd say, `Make your eyebrows
like you're scared,' and that would make him a little nervous.
And then I'd get what I wanted."

    Adam, a Manhattan nine-year-old who greets a reporter with
a plastic fly on his outstretched tongue, remembers it
differently. The parts he remembers, that is. (He's a little
fuzzy on the audition: "That was a year and a half ago," he
patiently explains.) Adam thought the work was "all fun," except
for one scene where he had to wear leg braces, another where he
rides a pony, and a few others where he was supposed to cry.
Could Fred be someone Adam might know? "No, he's too smart for
me." Could he exist somewhere? "It could be possible. It's true
that some people are like that. Yeah, maybe in Cincinnati." They
shot the movie in Cincinnati.

    We promise not to reprint this quote 20 years from now in
a cover story on Adam Hann-Byrd, world-famed entomologist. But
chances are good that Adam, who doesn't plan a lifelong career
as a little-boy actor, will evade the ravages of celebrity.
Whether he wants to or not. Most people go through graceful,
productive phases, and they pass with the same inexorability as
the awkward ones. Not many people shine in or on every stage.
Not many people are Jodie Foster.

    But think of this: as the child performer was to the adult
actress, so the tyro director may be to the mature auteur.
Little Man Tate, for all its acuity of craft and gallantry
toward its characters, could be simply the first step: the
Coppertone commercial of filmmaker Foster. If this is the larva,
imagine the butterflies to come.