but it wouldn't be make believe, if you believe in me

Paper Moon (1973)
3 Stars
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Starring Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal

Best known as a piece of Oscar trivia, Paper Moon is an enjoyable, lightweight road movie with its centerpiece an unsentimental, but absolutely precious little girl.

The trivia is that Tatum O'Neal is the youngest person ever to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. For that matter, she's the youngest ever to win any competitive Oscar (Shirley Temple won an honorary Oscar in 1935, the year Paper Moon is set in). It's a lesson in Oscar politics: Tatum's is undoubtedly the key role (she's on screen practically the entire movie), yet she won as a supporting actress. Any performance is eligible for a supporting actor nomination and apparently Paramount didn't think Tatum had a chance at Best Actress. They had a point: Tatum's performance, while exceptional for an eight-year-old, is not much by adult standards. It is better than Shirley Temple's star-making turn as a five-year-old gangster in Little Miss Marker, but not as good as Natalie Portman's twelve-year-old assassin in The Professional.

Bogdanovich seems to have felt cheated when not nominated for an Oscar, but I can understand that. To his credit, Tatum's appeal is more due to his direction than her acting. On the other hand, his attempt to evoke the Depression fails: the movie looks unmistakably 70s. His fooling around with deep depth of field and long takes is misapplied film school theory. The deep depth of field is mostly wasted when most compositions involve two people with nothing of interest in the background. The long takes only serve to draw you in when the acting is exceptional. With Tatum, it just highlights her lack of real acting skill.

While Tatum's character is not sentimental, the movie does depend on viewer sentiment to succeed. If you are susceptible to a cute girl acting tough in a tough situation, you'll enjoy Paper Moon.