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Also this issue: Falling on Deaf Ears |
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July 25-31, 2002
movies
 Lilith fair: Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) seduces Oscar (Aaron Stanford). |
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TadpoleDirected by Gary Winick A Miramax release Opens Friday at Ritz Five
Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford) heads home from prep school for Thanksgiving full of anticipation. As he rides the train with his classmate Charlie (Robert Iler), they lay out typical 15-year-olds’ plans. Oscar has a particular girl in mind, someone, he says, whom he’s “known for a while.” He won’t say her name, but drops that she’ll be at the Upper East Side party hosted by his father, Stanley (John Ritter), an Asian history professor at Columbia. As it turns out, she has good reason to be there: She’s the co-host, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), dad’s wife.
The crush is wholly understandable. Eve is wonderful in every way, a medical researcher who specializes in the workings of the (so metaphorical) heart. Witty, warm and beautiful, she even moves in poetic slow motion as Oscar gazes on her from across the room, removing her red cashmere scarf as if it's a heavenly vestment. She is also, to Oscar's keen eye, slightly melancholy, unfulfilled in some vague way. Her best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) confirms Oscar's feeling when she observes that Eve has a "void, something missing."
Determined to prove he's the one to fill that void, Oscar is at first frustrated by serial distractions (Eve has other people to talk to, Stanley sets him up with a colleague's daughter) until, at evening's end, he takes himself to a bar to drown his sorrow. The bartender serves him and a lovely young woman hits on him. In another movie, we'd probably be deep inside Oscar's fantasy world here, but not in Tadpole. As written by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller and directed by Gary Winick (who made the remarkable The Tic Code), this look at one teen's urgent desires takes a mostly blithe approach. If Oscar, precocious and privileged, sees his life collapsing around his ears, the film takes his point of view, with appropriate and convenient embellishments.
So on his way home from the bar, he runs into Diane, who takes him home to sober up. A chiropractor, she has a massage table in her apartment; she's wearing Eve's red scarf (glimpsed deliriously from Oscar's point of view through the head hole in the table), and before you know it, they're in bed. Mortified in the morning -- especially when he runs into "Phil, the boyfriend" in the kitchen -- Oscar swears Diane to secrecy, believing news of the tryst will ruin his chances with Eve. The rest of the film follows his efforts to contain Diane's relatively lackadaisical attitude and flirt with Eve. Stanley remains mostly on the sidelines, until a father-son heart-to-heart reveals to them both that perhaps they need to talk more.
As it assumes Oscar's perspective, the film allows that everyone is as smitten with him as he is, admiring his perfect French (his unseen mother is French), his charming gravity and his predilection for Voltaire, whom he quotes often and the film quotes even more often, in preciously ironic inter-titles, as in "every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do," or "reason consists of always seeing things as they are." Diane introduces him round to her girlfriends as a delightful confection, unusually passionate, suitably deferential and, apparently, a good lay. Oscar sits among them during a brunch, holding forth on some deep philosophical point, or at least a point that seems deep to a 15-year-old. The women cluck and coo; one gives him her number.
Such moments, however self-conscious, only underline Tadpole's too-cuteness, as do various set pieces (cleverly shot, intimate and also elusive, on digital video by Hubert Taczanowski): Oscar and Eve discuss poetry and passion in her lab, with repeated references to "the heart"; the four principals do an upscale restaurant dinner, Diane drinking to excess and Oscar so desperate to impress Eve that he's glued on sideburns, having heard that she liked Elvis when she was younger. (When she kisses him near the bathroom, she returns to the table with a sideburn stuck to her face.) Of course, the truth comes out, voices are raised, and Oscar, so sincere and so persistent, almost convinces Eve that he might fill her "void."
While Oscar's point of view can encompass poignant and ridiculous moments, the film retreats from the emotional edge set by the film to which it has been most often compared, The Graduate. In fact, Tadpole doesn't leave the comparison to chance. When Eve learns of the scandalous liaison, Diane tries to mollify her, observing, "It's all very The Graduate." Eve snarks back, "Except Oscar hasn't graduated." Yet, despite her protestations, Eve leaves this conversation more confused about her own feelings concerning her stepson.
Since most of the film takes Oscar's point of view, this scene stands out (with a couple of others), with action he can't know but might well imagine. Tadpole initially poses provocative questions about relationships or responsibilities: is Oscar "an adult, or close enough," as Diane says? Are middle-aged women so needy that a 15-year-old looks good? Is Stanley as clueless as he seems? But rather than letting them hang, disturbingly, it falls back on an attitude more smug than challenging. Worst of all, it closes with Oscar back on the train to school, a cozily bookended scene accompanied by Bowie's "Changes." Got it.
