Little Man Tate

Starring: Jodie Foster

Directed by: Jodie Foster

RS: Not Rated

1991 Drama

As an actress, Jodie Poster lives dangerously. She digs into the corners of her most challenging roles -- the child hooker in Taxi Driver, the rape victim in The Accused, the FBI novice in The Silence of the Lambs -- and comes up with something dark, daring hard to pin down. In Little Man Tate, she plays Dede Tate, a single working mother who can't figure out how to do the right thing for her seven-year-old son, Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). Fred is a prodigy -- he solves math problems like Einstein and plays piano like Rubinstein. But at school he's treated like Frankenstein. So Dede takes up the slack; she's not just his mother, she's his only friend.

In the cocoon of their shabby apartment, Dede can supply love but not mental stimulation. She's uneducated -- a dancer who mostly waits tables between gigs. She wants more for Fred. But an offer from Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy child psychologist, to enroll him in a program for gifted children leaves Dede feeling threatened. When Fred goes off with Grierson for the summer, Dede finds herself in competition with her son's benefactor. Foster's portrayal is beautifully nuanced, giving weight to the destructive as well as the nurturing impulses of the character.

It should be noted that Foster makes her directing debut with Tate. To her credit, there is no showing off with the camera. But there's no discernible personal style either, except for a becoming deference to the actors, including P.J. Ochlan as another whiz kid and singer Harry Connick Jr. as a college student who befriends Fred. Foster excels with newcomer Hann-Byrd. He's a marvel -- radiating intelligence without a hint of movie-brat precocity. An actress since she was three, Foster knows the agony and exhilaration of being considered special. When the film follows Fred on his odyssey of the mind, Little Man Tate is passionately involving, and Foster's direction is as sharply intuitive as her acting.

The problem is Scott Frank's screenplay, which keeps veering damagingly into soap opera. If Frank's lightweight and inexplicably acclaimed script for Dead Again aped Forties thrillers, this one echoes Forties tear-jerkers that had stars like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins competing for the same child's love. Foster confuses her priorities by playing it safe: The question of whether Dede can solve a math problem or Jane can cook a meat-loaf isn't one iota as compelling as the spectacle of a boy trying to balance a child's feelings and a raging intellect.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 616