| TADPOLE Rating:   Director: Gary Winick Producers: Dolly Hall, Alexis Alexanian, Gary Winick Writers: Niels Mueller, Heather McGowan Director of Photography: Hubert Taczanowski Cast: Aaron Stanford, Sigourney Weaver, Bebe Neuwirth, John Ritter Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Warren
Curry
6/25/02
Tadpole is this year's Sundance success story. Made on a budget of $150,000, Gary Winick's DV feature debuted at the aforementioned festival, and became the subject of a fierce bidding war in which Miramax eventually prevailed to the tune of a $5 million purchase price. Boasting a cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, the resurrected John Ritter and talented newcomer Aaron Stanford, and an interesting, slightly risqué concept, Tadpole, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to its advanced billing. It's not a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly nothing more than a mild diversion.
Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford), an intellectual, passionate 15-year-old returns home to Manhattan from his prep school for Thanksgiving vacation. He confesses to his friend Charlie (Robert Iler) that he's developed strong feelings for a girl and plans to reveal these feelings to the object of his affection over the holiday weekend. We learn almost immediately who the female in question is: Oscar's stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver). In her early 40's, Eve is a wise, attractive woman who also happens to be married to Oscar's somewhat in-the-dark father Stanley (John Ritter), a professor at Columbia University.
While Oscar, who loves all things French (he's fluent in the language and carries the work of Voltaire in his back pocket), attempts to devise a plan to approach Eve with his declaration of love, he mistakenly has a one-night stand with the woman's chiropractor best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth). For all of Oscar's intellect, he is grossly out of his league in the world of romance and adult sexual politics, but must somehow find a way to share his burning emotions with his stepmother.
Winick, along with writers Niels Mueller and Heather McGowan, are interested in exploring the confusion of adolescent "love" in all of its raw and misguided glory. The film takes elements of The Graduate and drives them headfirst into a dose of Spanking The Monkey, but Tadpole falls short of inhabiting the same company with either of those movies. A big problem is that only one truly complete relationship is crafted in the film, which is the one that takes place between Oscar and Diane. Eve feels like more of a thumbnail character sketch, and we aren't really given any reason to understand why Oscar, who also possesses quite a bit of common sense and maturity for his age, would be victim to falling for someone he could never hope to have. The film's ultimate resolution doesn't pay off much of anything, and with a running time just south of 80-minutes, it's a mystery why a few desperately needed scenes weren't added to flesh out the movie. The crude mini-DV look also doesn't lend itself well to the environment this film tries to capture.
The movie's humor is, on several occasions, painfully forced. Some of the comic one-liners are ridiculously on the nose, making us all too aware that we're watching a film. Stanford does deliver a great performance and is very convincing as both a gifted scholar and an in-over-his-head teenager. Neuwirth also shines as the seductive and likeable Diane, and her character is far better written than Weaver's, who isn't given the opportunity to do much with Eve. Ritter is along for the ride -- he neither helps nor harms the film.
In the end, Tadpole feels like
an unfinished work (it opts to take a huge shortcut in the final
act). Although I'd love to give the movie the benefit of the doubt,
and profess that its decision to not totally tie up the story
is a provocative move, it simply comes across as sloppy storytelling.
Tadpole certainly makes for a nice indie story about "the
little movie that could," but it offers scant more than pedestrian
entertainment.
(Screened at the 2002 Los Angeles Film Festival)
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