The following notes on Paper Moon were written by Lance St. Laurent, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts. A 4K DCP of Paper Moon will screen at the Cinematheque’s regular venue (4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave) on Friday, September 5 at 7 p.m.
By Lance St. Laurent
Casting real-life parents and children to act against each other on screen is a short cut to the kind of intimacy and rapport that sparks any scene they share—or at least that should be the case in theory. While a movie like Wild at Heart (1990) captures memorable performances from both Diane Ladd and her then 22-year-old daughter Laura Dern, the risk of a parent pulling far more dramatic weight rises considerably when one of the actors is still an actual child. In so many ways, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973) thus stands as an exception and an anomaly, both for its uncommonly accomplished father/daughter pairing and the ways their casting works pointedly against the actual text of Alvin Sargent’s script.
Moses Pray, the equal parts slick and stupid conman played with an oily charm and a buffoonish temper by a career-best Ryan O’Neal, doesn’t have a daughter. He’s quite insistent about this fact and never once changes his tune. When pressed by Addie (Tatum O’Neal), the resourceful orphan who becomes his unlikely traveling companion, he’s willing to admit that he may have picked up Addie’s mother, but as he puts it, “just because a man meets a woman in a barroom don’t mean he’s your pa.” It’s impossible, he says, and that’s all there is to it. Moses’s insistence can’t change what we see, though. The truth of Addie’s parentage is as plain as the nose (or rather the jaw) on her face. If the physical resemblance wasn’t enough, Addie’s quick study for the art of the grift makes it abundantly clear: she’s the fruit of his rotten tree and, much like Tatum O’Neal herself, an able partner in his misadventures.
Despite its Great Depression milieu and stark black-and-white photography, Paper Moon is as charming as movies get. Adapted from Joe David Brown’s novel Addie Pray, the film strikes a delicate balance of prickly cynicism and genuine warmth, a mixture perfectly embodied by the father-daughter duo at its center. Coming off the hit screwball throwback What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Bogdanovich was recommended Brown’s screen adaptation of his novel, which had originally been developed by John Huston as a project for Paul Newman and his daughter. Bogdanovich had worked with Ryan O’Neal on What’s Up, Doc?, and at the suggestion of his ex-wife and frequent collaborator Polly Platt, approached O’Neal’s daughter Tatum despite her lack of acting experience. The rest, as they say, is history.
As Moses (or Moze, as he’s usually referred), O’Neal could not be less like the nebbish pushover he portrayed in Bogdanovich’s prior film or the angelic pretty boy from his breakout film, 1970’s Love Story. Instead, much like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon two years later, Paper Moon taps into an impish streak in O’Neal’s star persona, imbuing Moze with a studied leading man charm that runs headfirst into his limited intelligence. Until Addie enters his life, he is as unbothered as he is unscrupulous, living life off the money he scams from widowed housewives and smooth-talking women into his bed. In Addie, he finds an unlikely foil, an incredulous tomboy who improbably surpasses him in grit, wit, and her eye for marks.
Fifty years on, Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning performance—still the record-holder youngest to win the award—remains a revelation. Not a moment from the young actress rings false or strains under the overly precocious, performative quality of many child actors. As a scene partner, she matches her father line for line, often buffaloing the dimwitted Moze with her perceptiveness and persistence. However, her dogged exterior is as much a facade as Moze’s slick-talking conman routine, just barely concealing the wounded loneliness of a little girl who just wants to be wanted, rather than being treated like a burden to be handed off among friends and relations. And it almost all plays on O’Neal’s tiny stoic face, a perfect straight woman to her father’s faux-genial grifts and buffoonish blunders.
Despite its warmth and wit, the legacy of Paper Moon is ultimately bittersweet. The film was a financial success and major awards player, earning three other nominations in addition to Tatum’s supporting actress win, along with launching the career of the young O’Neal. That career, however, was, like many child actors, notoriously rocky. Not only did she have to deal with her abusive father—Tatum claims that Ryan punched her after she was nominated for the Oscar and he wasn’t, among other indignities—her own promising career was derailed by an adolescence marked with substance abuse that earned her a reputation as a “wild child” in tabloid press. While Tatum has since overcome her addictions, she never achieved an adult acting career that matched the acclaim of her child work.
Paper Moon was the third mainstream hit in a row (after The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?) for director Peter Bogdanovich, who continued to work for decades but produced a subsequent string of costly, high-profile flops, including his two immediate follow-ups, 1974’s Daisy Miller and 1975’s At Long Last Love. Though Bogdanovich passed away a beloved auteur and scholar of classic Hollywood—with many of his later films reclaimed by cinephiles—his career as a major studio wunderkind effectively crested and began to fade with Paper Moon. By the end of the 1970s, Hollywood itself had moved on from the personal, stylistically challenging films of the so-called “New Hollywood” of which Bogdanovich was one the brightest luminaries, shifting toward a model of big-budget spectacle and opening weekend grosses inaugurated by Jaws and Star Wars. Even if Bogdanovich could have returned to his creative prime, the demand for films like his at the major studios had all but dried up.
Paper Moon effectively captures the beauty of a very particular moment in American history, both in the desolate Middle American backroads represented in the film and in its status as a creative peak of a fruitful period for its director, stars, and industry more broadly. It was a lovely moment that couldn’t last, a waking dream of artistic possibility in the studio system that could make even the most cynical grifter believe that a cardboard sea under a canvas sky could be real if you believed.