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Memo to Dakota Fanning
by Richard Horgan |
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1/26/2007 at 3:34:25 PM |
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First off, I can only imagine how daunting an endeavor it must be to one day decide that you no longer want to be perceived as strictly a benign child star, even though that celluloid corner is still proving pretty fertile; while most people would probably deem your recent live action version of Charlotte’s Web a flop, it is in fact this very weekend going to cross the $100 million worldwide box office mark. Not great, but certainly not bad either.
Of course, that all seems like a distant other world now, in the wake of your Hounddog hooha at Sundance. If there was a super-smart spider planted firmly in the corner of a nearby Park City ski chalet, I image he-she wouldn’t have been spinning the words “Some Pig.” Instead, it would have surely gone the extra spindle-mile to write out “Some Mistake.”
Unlike Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, which got Brooke Shields into a whole similar mess of trouble when she was the same age - 12 - Hounddog is not a great film. Not even close. So your first mistake was going with an unknown auteur quantity like writer-director Deborah Kampmeier, whose 2003 debut Virgin had another rape victim thinking her resultant offspring was the child of God. In other words, her pedigree is not quite that of Le Souffle au Coeur, the wonderful coming-of-age drama that Malle put forth in 1971, earning a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination.
Your mom Joy and your agent, Cindy Osbrink, should also have known that without the cloak of a respected foreign filmmaker like Malle, and the accompanying context of the more open European attitudes towards sex, it was going to spell trouble. Dropping you - after the first phase tier of Man on Fire, Hide and Seek and War of the Worlds - into a two-minute rape scene at this age was guaranteed to instantly inflame the Red States and any reporter in search of good pre-Sundance copy. After all, Jodie Foster waited until she was 25 to shoot The Accused and look what happened? Instead of going straight to DVD, she went straight to the Oscars.
But to top it all off, you tied yourself to a film that desecrates the memory of The King. There’s nothing cute about a precocious pre-teen girl gyrating suggestively to the sounds of Elvis Presley. Heck, you might as well have gone to the UK and made an indie where you were gang raped in a dream sequence by John, Paul, George and Ringo. With rappers a dime a dozen out there, and their music licensing rights in many cases available for much less, you had to mess with Elvis?
It’s back to animation voiceover work for you next with Coraline, and then – if it pans out – the subsequent drama The Secret Life of Bees, which looks like as good a transition project as any. But if I were you, Dakota, I would start thinking right now about your Audio Commentary for the Hounddog DVD, paying special attention to the words you will use to try and explain the rationale behind your now most infamous scene. Step up to the microphone, Miss D. You’ve got 120 seconds to win back the hearts and minds of American moviegoers.
Update - 01/29/07: It didn’t take long for the blogosphere’s faux Dakota to post a response to this. If you want to read it, click here.
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