Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Stephen Farber

“Yet Jeanie—the natural leader of the group—retains a surprising inner strength and sense of responsibility. We can’t say exactly where she gets her moral sense; perhaps it’s partly a reaction to the wasted lives she sees around her. She’s very much of this hard-edged, cruel world, but she refuses to let it destroy her. Jeanie’s resiliency is the mystery that the film celebrates, and Jodie Foster makes us believe in the character’s strength. Foster, a veteran of Walt Disney films as well as more mature fare like Taxi Driver, turned sixteen while Foxes was being shot. She can no longer be categorized as merely a gifted child star; she’s grown into one of the most subtle, self-possessed and luminous performers on the screen today….

“The performances give the film the humanity that saves it from sordidness. Foxes is a raw, startling work….”

Stephen Farber
New West, March 10, 1980

David Denby

"….[The] characters rarely break free of cliché…. Jeanie … is the survivor, the responsible one who tries to hold things together. Jodie Foster, blond hair falling straight down, plays her with a husky voice, a knowing eye, and a tolerant, richly understanding manner, as if Jeanie had already gone through everything and wanted nothing more for herself. It’s an oddly patronizing and embarrassing performance for an actress not yet out of her teens. Even a heavy-weather specialist like Susan Hayward was cheery and young before adopting the gin-soaked voice and bleary despair of her later performances. When Foster delivers a monologue about accepting the reality of pain and when she addresses the dead Annie at graveside, Foxes becomes a sanctimonious fraud: Annie has been killed off in order to give Jodie Foster a chance to act mature….”

David Denby
New York, March 10, 1980

Andrew Sarris

“….But let’s face it: They had me hooked from the outset by casting Jodie Foster in the lead. I’ll go see her in anything, and I’m never disappointed….

“But it is ultimately Jodie Foster who holds the picture together with her heavy-lidded, hoarse-voiced authority. Her face has gotten slightly plump in what should be her painfully awkward age, but the strange blend of skepticism (rather than outright suspicion) and generosity (rather than outright gullibility) is very rare in actresses of any age. From that first moment in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore when I mistook her for a boy instead of a girl, my attachment to her has gone beyond enchantment to enchainment. At a time when females (and males) are desperately looking for role models, one can do a lot worse than Jodie Foster, who seems to suggest hidden reserves of psychic, moral, and physical strength fo rthe most fearsome circumstances. Her last scene at the grave of a friend resonates with an adolescent solemnity that is alone worthe the price of admission. And it is good for a change to see a film that recognizes and respects the vulnerability of the young without slobbering all over it.”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, March 10, 1980