A don't-worry-be-happy movie. Complacently anti-intellectual, and a fount of comfort for the low achiever, it tells the tale of an ulcerous child prodigy named Fred (what would you expect him to be named? Chad? Eric? Trevor?), whose talents range from poetry to the piano to math to physics, so as to blanket all forms of genius as equally unavailing. In fact, waiting for this grave little boy to smile becomes something akin to waiting for Garbo to do so in Ninotchka. Only here you must wait all the way to the coda of his eighth birthday party, and in order to make the connection between that event and the events that precede it, you must also be able to make a leap that would daunt Evel Knievel. Before that, the bulk of the story is taken up with the efforts of an "advanced" educationist, and former child prodigy herself, to wean the boy away from his cocktail-waitress mother, in her Suzie Wong work outfit, and into new adventures at a national competition known as Odyssey of the Mind ("a kind of mental Olympics, if you will") and a summer college course in quantum physics. A few good laughs are generated along the way by displays of intellectual eccentricity -- that of an arrogant, vain, cape-wearing adolescent in addition to our main Little Man -- but Jodie Foster, doubling as first-time director and as the boy's mother, is too interested in "poignance" to make the most of the comic possibilities. Comedy, as we know, is distancing. It's warm fuzzy feelings that win friends. Dianne Wiest, Adam Hann-Byrd. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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