Word: tate
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...