The Haley Show

It takes about half an hour before Jackie Earle Haley appears onscreen in Little Children, but we already know what he looks like. He plays Ronnie McGorvey, who’s just been released from jail after serving two years for indecent exposure, and a local group (or at least one insanely obsessive ex-cop) has plastered the neighbourhood with flyers showing Ronnie’s mug shot and asking “ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE?”

The slightly downward angle of the camera emphasizes his balding dome and gives him a vaguely insectoid appearance—he looks like the humanoid cousin of the grasshoppers we hear chirping faintly on the soundtrack whenever the characters step outside. There’s a desperate, ravenous look in Ronnie’s eyes, but he doesn’t look anything like the predator the rest of the community imagines him to be; he’s thin, his skin stretched tight over his skull and his cheekbones. He’s hungry but he has no idea how to feed himself.

Part of the power, or even the shock, of Haley’s performance in this film is that he shows up after we’ve spent half an hour in the company of Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly, all of whom are playing lost, lonely suburbanites but who look every inch like movie stars. Even Winslet, whose supposedly “ordinary” physical appearance is frequently remarked upon, looks absolutely gorgeous in her practical-housewife wardrobe: in several scenes she wears a sporty one-piece red bathing suit with white, neatly stitched radii on the cups that perfectly flatters the curves of her body.

Haley, on the other hand, looks jarringly like a normal person. His balding hair has left a weird pattern, like three fuzzy wedges of pie—like a half-filled-in Trivial Pursuit playing piece. (In one nighttime scene we see him in the distance, hanging his head while sitting on a playground swing, and he’s just enough out of focus for the triangles of hair on the top of his head to resemble two sunken eyes and a silently screaming mouth.) He’s wearing a bathing suit—Ronnie is hoping to take a dip in the community pool—and he’s short and scrawny, maybe 5’5”, pale, hairy and skinny as a rat. There’s a closeup of his feet as he puts on his flippers, and his pointy anklebones stick out like corn-on-the-cob holders. His face is pockmarked, and you can’t help but recall the agonizingly public battle with acne that sabotaged Haley’s attempts in the early ’80s to make the transition from child star to adult actor.

Ronnie is an instant pariah in the pool—one by one, the parents recognize him from the posters and frantically order their kids out of the water. “I was only trying to cool off!” he shouts indignantly as the police drag him away, but the avid look in Haley’s eyes behind his diver’s mask as he gazes underwater at the children’s legs suggests a more unwholesome desire at work.

I’m of two minds about Haley’s Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children. On the one hand, if Haley won the award, it would be a thrilling comeback story: after drifting into straight-to-video dreck like Dollman and Maniac Cop 3, Haley (the former child star of Breaking Away and The Bad News Bears) finally dropped out of the movie business altogether in the early ’90s and took a series of embarrassingly small-time jobs: limo driver, security guard, pizza deliveryman. In a profile in Entertainment Weekly, Haley speaks very movingly about going before the cameras again for the first time in 13 years and realizing that acting was still part of who he was. Indeed, in all his interviews, Haley unfailingly comes across as an intelligent, dedicated professional who talks about his “whatever happened to...?” years with a remarkable lack of self-pity.

But oh my God, what levels of abasement his character had to descend in order to earn Haley that Oscar nod! (The sequence where potential girlfriend Jane Adams drives him home from a restaurant is particularly agonizing. Poor Jane Adams: between this and Happiness, she’s been on two of the worst dates in American cinema history.) Haley gives a brave, unshowy performance in Little Children, but I ultimately felt director Todd Field took advantage of that bravery—he simply doesn’t seem to share Haley’s compassion for his character. Winslet and Wilson’s suffering is portrayed with a tenderness, an aching understanding for the crazy, self-destructive yearnings that arise when you’re trapped in an unhappy marriage; Haley’s suffering is grotesque, inchoate, alien. I don’t think Field means to say that anyone who looks like Haley can’t possibly feel normal, human emotions, but Haley’s physicality is so striking that that’s the impression the film leaves you with.

I thought Dreamgirls was a pretty lousy movie, but if Jennifer Hudson wins the Oscar, it would affirm the notion that talent, not looks, are what should define you. I'm certainly not rooting against him, but if Haley wins the Oscar, it would seem to affirm the opposite principle.