When primates want to be endearing, they do this thing where they open their eyes wide and they open their mouths wide, thereby effecting a look of happy surprise and rendering themselves adorable to other primates. Observers of animal behavior call this phenomenon primate ''play-face''; observers of child movie actors could call it ''Macaulay Culkin visage.'' Mara Wilson, the 7-year-old who plays little Susan the Santa doubter in Miracle on 34th Street and who first set about winning us over last year in Mrs. Doubtfire, does all the right eye and mouth movements to ensure cuteness, and for good measure she lisps and wears a hair ribbon. But I don't want to play. Instead, this primate wants to shake her by her tiny adorable shoulders until her little Chiclet teeth rattle.
Mine is an ignoble reaction, I know, to a small person whose only aim is to fill my heart with gladness and the spirit of increased movie-ticket purchasing. But that's the risk young actors run when they are hell-bent on charm: There's a fine line between the average moviegoer's appetite for sweetness and our susceptibility to diabetic shock. Watching Wilson do her Miracle, remembering how Tina Majorino slipped from sympathetic (in When a Man Loves a Woman) to bathetic (in Corrina, Corrina), and contemplating the dramatic disappearance of the Culkin magic — a vanishing act that has left the young man with little to his name but a pair of very red lips and a very large bank account — I begin to think that no bank balance in the world is worth the disservice done to children by encouraging in them the very behaviors a real parent wouldn't tolerate in a real kid for a minute.
There is, of course, a fascination with child actors, and very good ones can be astonishing to see. I think of Max Pomeranc as the expressive young chess genius in Searching for Bobby Fischer, or Zelda Harris as the self-possessed little girl at the center of Crooklyn. But those fresh performers would do well to quit while they're ahead; the more they act, the more they will become capital-A Actors. The more that happens, the more likely they are to ritualize the little dramatic tics that adult directors have rewarded them for as their strengths. (Just when I thought the patented Culkin yesss! had been safely retired to home video libraries, Data picks it up in Star Trek Generations, proving only that his neuronet emotion chip was manufactured in Hollywood.) The more rewarded they are for their lisps and outbursts and Shirley Temple curls, the less likely those children are to behave like normal children in real life. The less normal their childhoods, the more likely they are to grow up bitter, unhappy, and at odds with the law, eventually writing petulant books about what they could have been had they not been forced to go yesss! all the time at an age when normal kids were home piercing their ears and watching Full House.
Cuteness is its own trap; as soon as kids know they're cute, they're not, which is why little Mara Wilson is in such dramatic danger. Cuteness also gets stale quickly, which is why Culkin has not aged well while the less cute Elijah Wood has. Monkeys look endearing doing primate play-face things, but small movie stars do not. Still, it's a scientific inevitability: Put enough moviemakers in a room monkeying around with enough child actors, and one of them was bound to remake Miracle on 34th Street and cast Wilson in the lead.
