Word: dede
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
...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...