MEDIA > ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS > 2005

DAKOTA FANNING, PHENOMENON AND KID
from PalmBeachPost, September 14, 2005
The Toronto Film Festival is this huge, hectic smorgasbord of movies and interview opportunities, most of which conflict and overlap. So one is continually making choices and revising them. Before I left Florida for the festival, Dreamworks had screened a couple of its movies as an enticement to get me to commit to an interview. One of them was “Dreamer, Inspired by a True Story.” (Yes, that’s actually the full title, which has to get you thinking that it probably diverges a great deal from the truth, right?)It is a sweet little family film about a young girl and her love of a horse who becomes a winning racer despite an early leg fracture. It is exactly the sort of film that makes me wince and that I normally would try to avoid. Except that it stars Dakota Fanning, of War of the Worlds, Hide and Seek and Man on Fire, an 11-year-old phenomenon that I wanted to meet.
Most child actors remind me of wind-up dolls who, understandably, have nothing to say or, scarier still, have a pre-programmed interview in their heads that they can regurgitate at a moment’s notice. Like everything else she does, Dakota was different. Or maybe an even better actress than I thought. For starters, her wide, newly-braced grin suggested that she actually enjoyed meeting the press and she talked openly and candidly, not like a midget adult, but a kid who felt she had the best job in the world. Extremely poised and natural, apparently thrust into the spotlight by her own choice, not some pushy stage mother. And one by one, the rest of the cast – Kris Kristofferson, Elisabeth Shue, Luiz Guzman and Freddy Rodriguez – emphasized (out of Dakota’s earshot) how in awe they too are of her, her professionalism, imagination and intelligence.
Dakota’s role model, she says, is Jodie Foster, one of the few child actors who made a smooth transition to an adult career. I do not doubt that Dakota will to, but she is already acting circles around her grown-up colleagues. None of this is quite enough reason to see Dreamer, but rent some of her past work and be astonished.

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