![]() ![]() "How come you're always talking like you're reading a book?" asks Fred, who read it in the script because it's certainly not in Wiest's performance. Jane is supposed to be cool and orderly, a wire monkey mother who can't connect. And against her better judgment, Dede turns the boy over to the clinician for the summer. Of course, Jane thinks she has it all over Dede when it comes to doing what's right for Fred. Though he's still something of a square peg, the sober Fred finds acceptance among the Brainy Bunch who accompany Dr. The relationship is thrown off kilter when Fred is discovered by brilliant child psychologist Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), a grown-up prodigy who runs Odyssey of the Mind, a smart summer camp attached to her Grierson Institute. That Fred calls his mother Dede and balances the checkbook tells all about their lopsided, love-struck relationship. A single mother who remains a child herself, Dede treats Fred less like a son than a surrogate mate. On top of that, his mother is a loser, and he has ulcers from worrying about world hunger and ozone depletion.įoster plays Dede Tate, a poor but cheerful cocktail waitress who dotes on Fred in her own feckless way. Endearing as he is, Fred has no friends and has yet to discover his peers. As a movie Foster child herself, she is attuned to the movie's half-pint star, Adam Hann-Byrd, if not to its guileless recipe for happily reordering the whiz kid's universe.Īdam, a fourth-grader with circles under his basset hound eyes, debuts as 7-year-old Fred Tate, a brainiac whose extraordinary gifts in math, music and art don't help one bit when it comes to playing catch. A battle of sorts ensues between the two women as they do what they believe is best for Fred, who brings out maternal instincts for the first time ever in Jane.After 25 years in front of the camera, Jodie Foster moves behind the Panaflex to direct "Little Man Tate," a proficient, tenderly told story of a child prodigy's search for social acceptance. In addition, people who do truly become Fred's first ever close friends as he sees them may not truly understand what literal Fred needs in his friend virginity. But taking Fred to the other extreme may not be what Fred needs to flourish either. Jane wants Fred to enroll in the Institute and after she gets to know him better wants to take him under her personal wing. Jane was considered an exceptional child herself. Their lives change when Fred comes to the attention of Jane Grierson of the Grierson Institute, a school for exceptional children. ![]() Dede understands this, and although she does indulge some of his intellectual pursuits, she wants him to be like a "normal" kid. But more than anything, Fred wants to have friends, which he doesn't have at his inner city public school because he is considered different. Because so, he is a sensitive human, who internalizes many of his feelings, and who has ulcers in part because he worries about the world's problems. His gifts, which are in the sciences and creative arts, are largely intuitive. Dede has known since Fred was an infant that he is gifted, even more so than the most exceptional of children. Uneducated working class Dede Tate is the loving single mom to now seven year old Fred Tate, the two who live in a small inner city apartment. ![]()
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