At The Movies

Child Stars are People, Too

Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
(**)

Sasha Stone
Mirror film critic
  
   Child stars are arguably one of the weirder byproducts of an entertainment-driven society. There is only one thing worse than a star whose popularity has faded, and that’s a child star whose popularity has faded. Most turn out to be strange, in fact, that the term “former child star” usually refers to a sad person with a sad life, who has definitely seen better days.
   However, there are a group of actors who refuse to be beaten by the stigma, reclaimed the joke and gladly make light of themselves – people like Barry Williams (“The Brady Bunch”) and Danny Bonaduce (“The Partridge Family”) – just to keep working. After all, what else can they possibly do with their lives? They’re famous and yet no one will hire them.
   Such is the conundrum facing Dickie (David Spade) in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, a film that, save for a few sappy plots twists, is not much more than a 90-minute-long Saturday Night Live sketch.
   The only thing more embarrassing than paying to see Dickie Roberts is actually laughing at the jokes in Dickie Roberts, of which there are many. Admittedly, these tend to be, for the most part, fat jokes (is fat really that funny?) but Spade, even at his worst, certainly knows how to deliver a line.
   Framed like an E! True Hollywood Story (if you watch SNL these days you’ll notice that most of the jokes are born out of writers who’ve been raised on a steady diet of TV), Dickie Roberts follows the pathetic exploits of a young actor who never had a childhood because his mother (Doris Roberts) forced him to forgo it in favor of work.
   Dickie was famous for saying “That’s nucking futs!” and the phrase haunts him throughout his “career” as a valet parker at a fancy restaurant. He plays poker with other has-been child stars, like Williams and Leif Garrett and “Screech” from “Saved by the Bell.” They talk of their glory days, and feel badly for Dickie, who wants nothing more than love from the audience he became addicted to. There’s a moment during the poker game when Dickie talks about what it was like to be loved by so many and then entirely forgotten.
   It’s at this point that it becomes all too clear that Dickie Roberts has bigger plans in store than providing a vehicle for Spade – it intends to make poignant observations about children whose lives are cursed by the fame that will then forever elude them as adults.
   Dickie Roberts isn’t just satisfied with helping its tormented characters out of the hell they’re living – but instead, wants to put forth a message about life: about how important it is to find human connections, to fall in love, to care about others – who gives a fut nuck if the public loves you? Fame isn’t real love, anyway.
   Dickie Roberts is peppered with has-beens and actual stars alike, with a particularly funny moment in an AA meeting with Tom Arnold. Brendan Fraser (“It’s Fray-zer”) even gets Dickie an audition with Rob Reiner (who has a nice little side career playing himself in movies) for a film called “Blake’s Back Yard.”
   Upon meeting Reiner, Dickie is told what a mess he is – that he never had a childhood and therefore isn’t a real person. How can he act in such a touching drama as Reiner’s? Dickie agrees then and there to go find a childhood.
   With money he’s gotten from selling his tawdry biography, he puts out an ad in search of a family who will let him live as one of their kids for a month. He ends up with in an outwardly perfect family with a “hot” mom (Mary McCormack) and two perfect little blonde children (who have the misfortune of acting in a film that basically says children shouldn’t work in showbiz) and a sort of shallow, absent father (Craig Bierko).
   Unfortunately, when Dickie must endure life as a “normal” child, the film loses much of its impact, in terms of real laughs and in exploring the idea of has-been celebrities. Once in suburbia, the film becomes predictable and dull. There simply is no way to bring back a lost childhood – especially not by doing kid things like the going on the “slip-and-slide” or drinking juice instead of coffee.
   Still, the nice and even touching thing about the film is that it gives a voice, though a small one, to fallen stars who essentially want to say: Please leave us alone when we’re out and about, or at least be polite. Unlike other annoying celebrities who do everything to be famous but then hate the non-stop attention, child stars never asked to be famous – they were thrust into it before they had a chance to say no. For every Jodie Foster, Brooke Shields or Ron Howard there are dozens of Corey Haims, Corey Feldmans and Dana Platos.
   It’s the nature of the beast that in Hollywood, very few survive. Fame is a silly notion in the final analysis – what does it really mean anyway? A lot of people know who you are? Or that they “love” you? As the film insists, we all just want to be loved – but what do we want to be loved for?
   Dickie Roberts is nowhere near the waste of time it ought to be. It’s no American Beauty, but it’s no Gigli either. It has a few good laughs and enough sweetness to justify its existence. Surely there are worse things to subject an audience to.