I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

"Little Man Tate" is a heartwarming, at times poignant, story of a precocious and highly intelligent little boy named Fred Tate (Adam Hynn Bird) incapable to develop sane relationships with his entourage, especially kids his age. His best friend is his mother, a twenty-something free-spirited single woman named Dede and played by a young Jodie Foster, he calls her by her name as if that complicity was a way to make up for the lack of real buddies. One of the most eloquent scenes shows a room full of birthday decorations, balloons, cake and candies, but lacking the essential: kids.This might sound like usual material; after all, gifted kids have always been lacking social skills despite their efforts. In a way, maybe these very efforts are the indicators that they have something to compensate, a sort of invisible burden but of socially handicapping effect. Still, the film obviously tries to get beyond these clichés by establishing the real trait of Fred; he's a smart boy with an incredible intuitive quality, so he can make his own diagnosis. His capability to 'understand' even the most obscure and hidden meanings maybe surpasses his ability to juggle with cubic roots and logarithms, so the paradox is that he can tell you what is wrong with him. But like in a math riddle, just because you can tell what the problem is doesn't mean you've got what it takes to solve it.Fred tries his best to have ersatz of contacts with the other kids. The problem is that he's like a collateral victim of his intelligence, he's highly anxious over the future of the world, developing an ulcer from the anxiety, and yet he needs to be constantly challenged, to satisfy the particularities of his gift. Fred needs challenges he obviously can't find in the very world he wants to fit in, and he needs the real world to fulfill a few dreams, there's a sort of complex situation that an outsider will try to solve. The third player is Jane, played by Dianne Wiest, a former gifted child who helps them to find a path through painting, artistic creations, and travels to Orlando, contests and interview. As they say "travels broaden the mind" and that's what she tries to do.There is not much of a plot except a fascinating coming-of-age story revolving around the 'love' triangle between Jane who's obviously fascinated by Fred and is convinced she can help him to find his way and Dede who can't stand the way he's treated like some sort of a circus freak. It's like "Good Will Hunting" with Wiest in the Skarsgard and Foster in the Williams' roles, but with maternal love at stakes. Dede even threatens Jane to kill her if anything wrong happens, and killing isn't a manner of speaking. But it seems like Fred is interested in these experiments, and during his journey, he comes across many interesting encounters, an obnoxious mathemagician kid wearing a black cape and a young adult student who teaches him billiards. But these relationships never last and tend to project the same reality to Fred: he needs a real mother and real friends.Jane doesn't even seem capable to play a mother role, as she was too focused on the intelligence of her children she couldn't reach the intelligence of the heart, and Dede can't reach her son's mind. The story progresses nonetheless through a fascinating path where Fred's insecurities and weaknesses, rather understandable for a child, highlight the more unstable emotions of adults and inevitably lead to a moment of rebellion where Fred is obviously tired of being an object of fascination and prefers to be a subject. Jodie Foster was an appropriate director for she was a gifted child and maybe the character of little Fred was a way to let some repressed feelings steam off and reveal the curse of being below the others.This is a 'little film' by the usual standards, in 1991, Jodie Foster would be more noted for her performance as Clarice Starling in "Silence of the Lambs" but the acting and yes, the directing, provide very interesting characters, so deep and real we actually care for them and wish they can find the strength to overcome these kind of puzzling dilemmas where everyone is both right and wrong. I only wish the resolution was handled in a better way, it seems that the film didn't care for a climax and things seemed to have been fixed by themselves as we couldn't tell what happened between the TV incident and the birthday party that concluded the film.There must have been some off-screen reconciliation or deep discussions but we never get to know them, maybe it was a deliberate choice, an artistic license from Foster, telling us to give this little kid a break and accept that he could finally be a happy little boy. I guess I longed for more complexity but despite that little faux-pas, this is a movie that I enjoyed as a kid, and realized that it still held up very well with my adult mind.

I had to smile at the legend before the end titles - "A Jodie Foster Film" - one movie and she's an auteur! Nevertheless, this is an accomplished well acted, "little" film looking at the gift-cum-curse of being a gifted child in a largely misunderstanding world.To be fair, the movie looks little more than a better-than-average TV movie, but is elevated by its director's star turn in front of the cameras, plus some neat little (that word again!) directorial flourishes, like a slow cutaway into the distance of Foster's workaday waitress Dee Tate's mother/son dance with young son Fred and at other points interesting suffusions of light and animation to perhaps demonstrate the surging thought process of the precocious infant.The narrative gets a little skewered as Fred is adopted by a wealthy philanthropist female, childless naturally, whose feelings quickly move from professorial to matrimonial and a too obvious conflict with Foster's more down-home mother love. Some of the situations are a little too pat also, for instance the way that Fred cleaves to older boys, one a maths prodigy himself, the other a piano-playing college boy (played by a young Harry Connick Junior), the lad obviously groping emotionally for a male bonding relationship with his natural father nowhere around.Freak occurrences too like Connick's initial encounter with Fred (symbolically dropping the whole world on his shoulders!) and a side-lined Foster's rescue of a drowning child just as Fred's making an appearance at the professor's side on national TV also jar credulity a little and of course sentimentality rears its largely unwelcome head before the happy ending, but I'm perhaps being too severe on what is when all is said and done, a warm, family entertainment on an off-beat subject.

I just wanted to put in my 2 cents and praise this movie because I felt that there were so many negative comments for such an uplifting and heartwarming film. I tip my hat to Jodie Foster for acting so fluidly all the while debuting as a director too. Sure, it was a simple movie, but I think that that was her point; simple, to the point and most importantly, you were supposed to feel good after having seen the movie. My favorite scene was when Fred and Eddie (Harry Connick Jr) befriend each other and they're playing piano. The tap-to jazz music in the movie is great and keeps the movie going at that jazz pace. I think it's a wonderful flick and makes a great watch with the girlfriend film.

I LOVE this movie!!! In fact, it is my favorite. I was a senior at the University of Cincinnati at the time it was filmed and my best friend is in two scenes. The college scenes were filmed primarily at the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio at McMicken Hall and outside the campus. The scene with Harry Connick Jr. at his apartment is in a dilapidated apartment building on Ludlow Ave. The scenes of Odyssey of the Mind were filmed at the Wexner Center of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. During filming Jodie Foster kept a low profile, as she also directed. This story is truly timeless...gifted education is still in the formative stages today. The movie shows that a careful balance between the nurture of the parent and the wisdom of the educator can give children an environment to reach their potential in a healthy way. Jodie Foster is wonderful as the loving but uneducated mother and Harry Connick Jr. has his first screen role in a major motion picture!