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There's an article running in the current August issue of the magazine DETAILS which features a photo spread on some of the more popular child stars of the last 20 years. It would be more appropriate to label them as the former young stars of television. There seems to be a huge difference between the child stars of TV and those who have been featured in major motion pictures. The kids on television are far more precocious than those who are in the movies, reaching for a degree of realism.
Well, unless they're in a Disney movie. But that's a whole other Kurt Russell of a different colour.
I started thinking about kid actors in movies after looking that article over (I would normally say "reading" it over, but it's really nothing more than a few short blurbs accompanied by some glossy shots of the former actors, a few of which look like they are paid more than they have in the last few years combined) and then realizing that one of my least favorite kid actors is going to be splashed up on the big screen this weekend.
Abigail Breslin is featured in the upcoming NO RESERVATIONS (a movie remade from the excellent German flick MOSTLY MARTHA, something that you'd be better off checking out instead of the Americanized version) but is more widely known as the shrieking little pile of ugly from last year's sensation, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. She was actually in a few movies prior to her Oscar-nominated turn in the broken down van that could.
In fact, the first movie that she starred in was a fairly prominent role. She was Mel Gibson's daughter Bo in M. Night Shyamalan's SIGNS. I watched that movie in the theater and remember liking it to a degree (mainly because of another former child star, Joaquin Phoenix) but can't say right now that I remember her all that well. After watching her in LMS, I did catch her in the movie KEANE, an independent flick about an alcoholic father who is searching for the daughter that was supposedly kidnaped from him. The only reason why I noticed it was her was because I'd seen and loathed her previously.
I'm usually asked why I'm so harsh when it comes to Miss Breslin. I guess it's because she's not an actress and yet repeatedly gets told that she is such. She's in reality a little girl who appears to be docile enough that she'll take direction as she's told. That doesn't equal talent. That equals a brain dead little lump of flesh who was nominated because it had been a few years since they last put a child in front of the awards ceremony watching screen.
That would have been Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2002 for the movie WHALE RIDER, an actress who can actually act. Although she's not really doing anything with it, considering that she just became a mom at the age of 16. Prior to Castle-Hughes it was Anna Paquin in 1993's THE PIANO, and she actually took home the gold. The other young actresses who have walked the red carpet were Jodie Foster in 1976 for TAXI DRIVER, a movie in which she played a young prostitute (Foster was 12 at the time it was filmed and had to undergo a psychological evaluation in order to take the part because the director feared it might scar her emotionally). The youngest actress to win was Tatum O'Neal in 1973's PAPER MOON. She was 10 years old at the time and managed to piss off her actor father Ryan O'Neal, who complained about not even getting nominated for Best Actor that year.
Foster wasn't the only person crossing the boundaries of what was considered safe cinema for young actresses. In 1978's PRETTY BABY we got to witness the 13 year old Brooke Shields, previously only known as being a child model and pageant winner, play a prostitute in the red light district of New Orleans in 1917. People were shocked that the doe-eyed young Shields would be allowed to act (although it's stretching to really call what she did in that 
Miss Breslin, meet your future |
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movie as "acting") in such a film. Still, I think it was a sign of the times. It wasn't so much that we were exploiting the young woman, it was that we were using appropriately aged representations to properly convey that ugliness grows around beauty everywhere we turn.
People are too afraid to try and pull that off any more. Consider for a second the plight of this year's HOUNDDOG, a movie featuring the beloved child star Dakota Fanning. The very day that the film wrapped production, headlines started to appear about how there was a rape scene including the young actress. People were so enraged that filmmakers would have allowed something like this to be filmed (disregarding, I suppose, that this was a fictional situation) that tensions were high when the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. Fanning was followed around the snowy resort town by huge bodyguards all designed to protect her from the conservative people who were offended by a scene that they hadn't even seen yet. People who were claiming that the safety of children needed to be preserved and yet were threatening the safety of one of those very children.
Fanning is a good example of the other thing I hate about child actors in the movies. When I first saw her, she was the teary-eyed young daughter of Sean Penn in the emotional movie I AM SAM. She was convincing as the daughter of a developmentally disabled man who fights to retrieve his daughter from the Child Protection Services that remove her from his care because they think he's insufficiently able to look after her. I was moved by her angelic little face and wanted, much like the rest of the nation did at the time, to figure out who this little person was.
Fanning has since gone on to be in 11 other feature films (excluding her voice work in a couple of Disney straight-to-video numbers) since then, becoming the Jodie Foster of her era. She is in the upper pantheon of child actors, the ones who make a career out of being precocious on camera, and seem to be the only people under the age of 18 that we get to see for 10+ year stretches of time. You start to believe that the only kids out in this world at blue-eyed blondes who speak more articulately than most adults you come into contact with.
Breslin isn't a Fanning, thankfully. I don't see her turning into a graceful swan as she gets older. I also don't foresee her acting capabilities growing with age as Fanning's undoubtedly will. She's much more of a female Corey.
Popular during the mid-'80's to mid-'90's, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim were those cute boys who popped up in every film that needed an adorable teenaged lead. They could hit their marks, say their lines and have people smiling without doing a whole lot of anything. The industry had them snookered into thinking that they were bonafide actors when in reality they were nothing more than a prop that fit the right age description. Both of the young men went on to having drug addiction problems, losing their looks and whatever fraction of credibility they might have had.
I'm not saying that Breslin is doomed to a life of snorting coke off the crack of some lesbian DJ's ass. What I AM saying is that she's not cute and she can't really act. So unless she wises up and realizes that she's that appropriately aged prop, she's in for some hard times when she gets older and tries to form a career, going into auditions spouting off things like, "You wanna hear me scream like I'm really excited? I can scream really good!!!" (Sadly, the formerly promising Haley Joel Osment falls into this category as well. I can't picture him doing a reading without the casting director asking him to repeat his famous line of, "I see dead people," as quoted from his Oscar nominated role in the movie THE SIXTH SENSE.)
While the above two 
Mickey Rourke, the second coming |
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categories of child actors are what comprise most of Hollywood, occasionally there are movies who feature young kids just being kids. The best example of which is from this summer's smash hit KNOCKED UP. Directed by Judd Apatow and starring (amongst several others) his wife Leslie Mann, the movie features Iris and Maude Apatow in the roles of Charlotte and Sadie, the young daughters of Mann and actor Paul Rudd. The kids' parents argued over whether or not they should be featured in the production (Apatow was for it, Mann was against) and ultimately you have two young girls who are clearly just being filmed for their honest reactions, having a blast and being caught in the moment of being children. These are not really actresses in the common sense. However, they are the least affected of any child that I've seen on the silver screen in quite some time, all of which leads to their wonderful charm.
Then there's the more rare circumstance of having a child actor who is a complete fluke. A one-hit wonder who doesn't just get captured being a child but really knocks one out of the park and contributes to the production. Such is the case with Tara Devon Gallagher in the 2005 film, SWIMMERS. Gallagher's only other contribution to film is the documentary MAD HOT BALLROOM, which featured young students from New York City schools learning how to ballroom dance. In SWIMMERS she is the daughter of a lower-middle class family whose father and older brother are fishermen, working with the seasons to scrape by for their family. When it is discovered that she needs an expensive operation to save her hearing, life changes for everyone in their tight familial unit. Gallagher is unaffected and real, but at the same time doesn't appear to be struggling to remember her lines or reach for some unrealistic emotion that most children haven't yet experienced. She was 12 years old when she filmed the movie and I have to scratch my head and wonder if she'll be in anything else and whether or not she should.
People love to talk about the deterioration of young actors (and especially the rail-thin and drug and Red Bull addicted actresses of recent years) and how they've all gone insane. David Faustino, featured in that Details Magazine article I mentioned above, most notably known as Bud Bundy from the television series "Married... With Children" but also just as well known for his recent arrest for marijuana possession, comments that child actors have always been crazy. It's just with the proliferation of home computers and the usage of the internet that people have finally really caught on. We don't go 2 hours without a news report, let alone 2 days back when Robert Downey Jr was getting arrested or the years that it took us to figure out our beloved Dorothy (Judy Garland in THE WIZARD OF OZ) was a pill popping, alcoholic mess.
We chew up and spit out things and people faster than we ever had before, leaving the wreckage of young stars like Brad Renfro (12 years old when he was cast in 1994's THE CLIENT - and a damn decent actor at that), Edward Furlong (14 when he starred in 1991's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY), and Natasha Lyonne (7 years old in 1986's HEARTBURN, although more notably remembered for the movie SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS when she was 18) in our wake. It's true that people are predisposed to being alcoholics, drug addicts and has-beens. But I can't help but stop and wonder what it would have been like for some of these former young up-and-comers if we'd treated them as more than just entertainment.
Damn... that might mean I have to stop being so cruel in my comments about Miss Breslin. Eh, screw morality. 10 bucks is a LOT to pay for a movie nowadays. Those little brats might as well be worth it.
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| Neglected Foster Child of Hollywood |
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