DAVID SIM Tadpole made a splash at Sundance, announcing the arrival of Gary Winick. But after Tadpole provided him with a ticket to the mainstream, Winick showed a predilection for blander, more middling material. The increasingly dire likes of 13 Going On 30, Charlotte's Web, Bride Wars and Letters to Juliet. This dreary, undistinguished career would have probably continued until it was suddenly cut short when Winick succumbed to brain cancer.Tadpole was quite risqué for the normally conservative Winick, and the one shining light in an otherwise throwaway career. You have to wonder what it was about Tadpole he got right that he managed to get wrong on everything else. And when a theme is a teen being romanced by a woman twice his age, something bound to raise the eyebrows of more than a few in an audience, Winick's accomplishment seems all the more remarkable. Winick seemed to fancy himself a Martin Scorsese or a Steven Spielberg. Someone with the capacity to take on any genre regardless of what it was: family films; rom-coms; fantasy, etc. Tadpole seemed to be Winick's attempt at a Woody Allen movie. It lacks the same introspection, but compared to everything still ahead for Winick, its a gem.Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford) is visiting his parents in New York for Thanksgiving. He's got all the girls swooning over him, but he's only got eyes for Eve. She's smart, classy, sophisticated. Everything he wants in a woman. She's perfect, except for one pesky detail. She's his stepmother! Oscar hasn't even finished prep school yet, and just sees the age barrier as a hurdle to surmount.While his father Stanley (John Ritter) tries to set Oscar up with every teen girl on the Upper East Side, things spiral out of hand when Oscar falls into bed with Eve's best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth, delightful). She's quick to brag about it, while Oscar tries to sort out mixed emotions before Thanksgiving dinner.There's a scene in Tadpole when Oscar is described as having the soul of a man in a teen's body. Gary Winick later conducted a gender reversal on that idea, to much blander effect in 13 Going On 30. Tadpole was one film where Winick pulled everything together. Since he never pulled off that trick a second time, I suspect it was more to do with the excellence of the cast, and having such a witty script at his disposal.Admittedly, Tadpole makes things easier on itself by having a male teen (instead of a teen girl) caught in a love triangle with two older adults. Aaron Stanford is also too old to credibly play a teenager. But the script is deft the way it deals with Oscar's romantic entanglements. Part of the reason for this is because scriptwriters Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller place Oscar at the centre of a marvellous triptych of conflicting adults.Eve, Stanley and Diane are all well defined. Sigourney Weaver gives Eve a great injection of class. Its obvious why Oscar loves her so, even if she is his stepmother! John Ritter plays Stanley with perfect indifference to the insane situation going on around him. But the performance that lights up the film comes from the vastly underrated Bebe Neuwirth.Its great the way Neuwirth walks a fine line between spicing up her love life and committing such a reprehensible act. Diane doesn't mind sleeping with a teen who showed interest in a woman her age. Granted he was drunk at the time but Diane can learn to live with that! What amazed me more than anything about Tadpole is that for such a potentially squeamish topic, and something Winick never managed with the far safer Bride Wars or 13 Going On 30, is that the film is funny in spite of that.I did find it difficult to believe that Diane would want to boast to the girls in her age range about Oscar, but Neuwirth's delight at watching the situation snowball into a sublime comedy of errors is joyous. It all blossoms into one wonderful scene in a NY restaurant, where Oscar, Eve, Stanley and Diane are all at dinner together. Weaver's sobering intelligence, Ritter's condescension and Neuwirth's glee at Stanford's discomfort play off of one another superbly. The one thing that lets the film down is a bland visual scheme. Tadpole was made extremely low budget, and it shows. The film looks like its being captured through the lens of a camcorder, but not like cinema verite. I think that was all they could afford on the budget they had at hand, but because the actors are working from such a terrific script, that's enough to carry Tadpole over the rough spots.Another plus is Winick is content to let the actors lead the show without too much interference from him. He just lets them tell the story without resorting to obvious signposting. Something that seemed to escape him on Charlotte's Web and Bride Wars. The nearest it ever gets to that is the constant quotations from Voltaire. I'm not sure the film needed these because they tend to get in the way of the narrative, and what with only a running time of 78 minutes, they feel more intrusive than informative.Still, Tadpole is a film of surprising charm. It never does resolve the dilemma it sets up for itself, and Oscar is more naive than he likes to believe. I also would have preferred an extended running time, and it works better as comedy than it ever does as drama, but Tadpole is winning, sharp and very insightful. All things you can never say about any other Gary Winick movie.

moonspinner55 Bebe Neuwirth's performance as a 40-ish chiropractor in New York City who has an affair with a high school sophomore holds the only interest in this ridiculous, inexplicably celebrated independent film shot on digital video. Aaron Stanford plays Oscar, who is described for us as a "40-year-old living inside a 15-year-old's body"; he quotes Voltaire, reveals a fetish for great hands, and harbors a crush on his stepmother, a medical scientist who apparently doesn't notice the moony-eyed look on her stepson's adoring face. "Tadpole" was picked up at Sundance by Miramax, who couldn't market this thing to anyone but the most rabid Sigourney Weaver fans. Weaver does decent work as the object of Stanford's affection, however it is Neuwirth as a sort of updated Mrs. Robinson who steals the show. Otherwise, this is a comedic flirtation with sophisticated manners which is in itself not sophisticated. The clumsy writing spells out everything for us, the characters are all predetermined, and Stanford is singularly without dimension or appeal. * from ****

intelearts ONe of the better slices of irony seen in a while that bears more than a passing resemblance to Woody Allen (If it were a girl gunning for her stepfather then you really would say it was obvious).Oscar is 15, trying to be cool and an intellectual, a fogey, and a lot of the humor comes from his pseudo-deep insights on life and Voltaire. Voltaire is no coincidence: Candide is Oscar in parts. Oscar wants the ideal - just in this case the ideal is Eva - his stepmother.A lot of this works because of the characterization and chemistry - Oscar fins himself caught in others' webs, but is somehow a good mix of mature and innocent that works well.All in all a nice effort, it never really bites and thus given the material and nature of the film fails to really skewer the comedy and ends up almost a nostalgic look at how 15 year old boys wish love could have been.Funny in parts and wistful this is a nice film about adult relationships.

noralee "Tadpole" is a delightful tribute to "The Graduate" (complete with an appropriate cover of Simon & Garfunkel, this time using "Only Living Boy in New York" -- and the senior citizens in the audience with me didn't get the symbolism). The New York setting and boarding school holiday vacation are also resonant of "The Catcher in the Rye."The usually done by Jake Gyllenhaal role is here sweetly played by newcomer Aaron Stanford, though Bebe Neuwirth absolutely steals the movie out from under him (literally) with more than one wink at "Sex and the City."All these affectionate references combined, this is still a lovely, original comedy with believable characters who get themselves in odd yet understandable situations. Maybe the dialog keeps referring to them being on the Upper East Side to make this seem less of a Woody Allen movie (if he would write for a different age and a cuter character) but the locales in our faces are actually the Upper West Side.The lengthy thank you's in the credits are testament that this is an indie movie that called in a lot of people's favors. I therefore understand the use of cheaper digital video, but it is really annoying on a movie screen, very blurry. Nice use of two covers by Adam Cohen on the soundtrack. (originally written on 8/11/2002)