I would like to talk about If You Believe

I have seen Hayden youngish (The Dust Factory) but never was I prepared for how small the little imp was when she could talk a mile a minute--and what a froggy voice! How did it become the just awesomely beautiful singer in The Dust Factory?
I'm not kidding, did you see those tiny mitts on Hayden? And she had that beautiful, doll's forehead--the kind I so fear is going to break, on a tiny girl, it's so delicate. Yet you saw Hayden in her --and a lot of spunk you never knew Hayden was.(And you know she was spunky just holding a toy out of a smaller child's reach at the end of The Dust Factory).
For all that she's done lately, I think she limits herself by taking modern teen issue roles like ice skating and cheerleading. Both Reese and Scarlett had break-out films at 14 and 15 that showed their range and depth as girls pre-makeup and heels. Hayden had no such role in a "great" movie.

Witherspoon's "The Man in the Moon" showcased old-fashioned values of family and respect for elders, with a great performance by an adult actor, Sam Waterston, as well as great performances by others who seemed to vanish off the planet, the sister and the boy the sisters crushed on. The movie is a classic because it shows a family sleeping on the porch in summer and all the old things about the old south that will now, trust me, cause the children to be taken from the parents for neglect--you can't sleep on your un-air-conditioned porch.

There was the family dinner hour, girls dressing for it and cooking it and doing the dishes like it used to be for all families.
The scene where Reese comforts her sister produced a whole new Danni--a womanly one from the hotrodding-Daddy's-truck lovin' little bubble-blowin'gal.


Scarlett's movie is a classic because it has that huge horse bursting through the 16-wheeler's windshield and being flung. You know it will never be the same. Seeing it enjoy the beauty of Big Sky country, showing curiousity at Robert Redford and his horse, is all tear-jerking stuff. The little girl bravely facing being dragged by her horse was special. THe idea of Grace losing a leg was great plotting.

We get a lot more respect for the magnificant creatures and loyal friends horses are, for the children maimed in accidents, for their parents, for the cattle rancher, for the big American outdoors with its great beauty. For cowboy songs around campfires. The love story almost becomes immaterial, although seeing the child light up at the father's presence we know what the mother will pick.

Throughout it Scarlett stays in character, giving us many glimpses of a somber-faced young natural beauty, just as Reese had. She never says she's afraid of her horse; we just have to see her start to give him a treat, then empty her hands. Both movies are classics for themsleves and for the actress picked to be 14 in them and how she went on to do many other things and this became her break-out role.

Hayden is already on to the many other things part, but I was never confortable with "The Dust Factory"'s Melanie being her breakout role. it wasn't a serious enough movie to push any role into outstanding status, although Ryan Kelley and Armin Mueller-Stahl did their best, too.

It just wasn't an All-American movie the way the other two were, one shining on our large cattle-ranging lands and the healing properties of getting out of the city , one on sparsely-populated towns in the sticks when clothes were ironed and everyone was at the dinner table and said yes sir no sir and Dad said "don't ask your mother why when she tells you to do something --just do it!"."The Dust Factory" settles on a universal theme--the fear of moving, of dying and of living because you don't know what's next. Any nationality could've chosen it. Even with Hayden's beautiful singing voice in it it doesn't become a classic.

"Racing Stripes" just isn't coming-out for Hayden, and other movies she's not really starring in. "If You Believe" almost has to be her first real role. And she was every bit lovable, in her way more so than Scarlett or Reese,who were the age of the first bra, while she was more like 8 years old.



It's where we see the young person at the point where they are finishing that person and stepping into the wings of a teen woman. Any later than "If You Believe", Haydyn persists in acting in roles that say she's already had her big "last movie done as a natural kid" --is now in the expensive evening gowns like the rest of the wealthy celebrity women.
If there's a better movie showcasing her as a pre-teen, as a child on the eve of teenhood, I want to know it, because "If You Believe" never gets into her on the level that "The Horse Whisperer" did for Scarlett and "The Man in the Moon" did for Reese.
It's definitely the Hayden we'll never see again, like with the other two-- that's why you can't really take a movie Hayden made much later than it and use it as her break-out performance--you already see the her she is now, as early as in "Raising Helen".

That leaves a small handful of movies from 1998-2004 I haven't seen that may show her as little, like "If You Believe"-"Remember the Titans", "The Affair of The Necklace", "Joe Somebody", and "Normal". None sound as if she is THE little girl of the movie, and what it's about. The imdb page on "Normal" shows that she looks as she does in "Ice Princess" and everywhere else--like she is now. The chest is perhaps a tad smaller. Where is she from ages 8 to 11? That's when her great role needed to be.

The Hayden that vanishes with the moon at sunrise, like Danni Trant the coltish child without make-up did, like Grace the flat kid with the teeth that needed braces did on the ride home from Montana.Both tanned faces did a crisp white blouse proud.
Where's the Hayden who was left on the horizon forever a child,in panaramic, for us to relish again and again?

Joe's the subject of "Joe Somebody", and "Remember the Titans" is about Denzel Washington and a whole team of football players, with Hayden in a bit part; she plays the younger version of the star of "The Affair of the Necklace", who vows as a child to get it back, then does so as an adult. (That's no role; it's background.)
There's not even a picture of her or a child mentioned in the plot summary of "Message in a Bottle", and the mini-series "A Will of Their Own" has no photo of her or a name given in the casting credits for her character. "The Object of My Affection" is certainly all about others, and the rest of Hayden's work was in animation and soap operas, unless a mermaid role at about age 7 is crunchier than I realize.

She needed that movie before she got a chest and hips and butt (regardless of how well she cheerleads them into shape)and put on that first red lipstick. Barring that, I don't understand why "If you Believe" is so rarely on. It is our only glimpse of the wonder child Hayden Panettiere, needed to sit with "The Horse Whisperer" and the "Man in the Moon" in a 6-movie set with the young ladies' best adult roles also included. (Or, their "lady of yore" roles--"A Good Woman" for Scarlett, "The Importance of Being Earnest" for Reese, and one like those for Hayden.)

Is there any other "thing Hayden" that gives us the little girl of "If You Believe?" Could her mama have been so dumb? Don't we all know that the hot, or cooly cool, dynamite little girl vanishes forever under the folds and eyes,lipstick and hair-dos, manners and pretensions of the woman she becomes?


We will have the woman in our movies for many more decades. There was one chance to really show the child , and even if she hadn't much range, she still would have been uniquely different enough from her adult self to move and entertain us.The only place I'd ever seen Lindsay Lohan was The Parent Trap, and that person had come into her own as that hot-tempered, firey freckled tomboy. Seeing photos of her without freckles, with blond hair and tweezed brows, I just don't know where the first one went.
Which is the real one? Are they both authentic? I'm a woman, and this is a carefully considered question.

Over and over, I see it, and as a mother, I have now seen it at its ultimate. The baby you bring home from the hospital whose breath smells like no breath has ever smelled-delightful-who evolves into a child of two who plays little gags on you, remembers them and plays them again--this person is gone a few years later leaving a very lovable much bigger chrysalis than they were themselves. Always the youngest disappears and a lovable older person is in your world, no longer capable of random sounds while waiting in a van at a stalled intersection or freeway ramp, but maybe capable of learning songs from you or teaching you one if not at the age where they love whatever they know you like least. They vanish, to leave these older ones. And while you love them, who think of themselves rightly as continuous, you also seperately have deep love and a feeling of loss of the gone baby, toddler, pre-schooler, 2nd-grader, 10-year-old, 15-year-old. That's why I will put "If You Believe" in that boxed set, if no other choice comes up.


Little Hayden definitely needs to be part of our filmland accomplishments , next to her great "adult at 17" roles and what-all she does from here. That little rascal was too lovable to shove aside. She, like little Reese and young Scarlett, are people we will always love, along with the adult thems, and we are so fortunate to have both incarnations of these greats on film. If Hayden got nothing better than "If You Believe", well, she got lucky enough, for it shows her skipping through waiting rooms others (who don't see her) sit gloomily in, her once trade-mark long ringlets bouncing, it shows her walk circles around people, talk a mile a minute, you could say she shows off that ability to mimick emotions that got Shirley Temple her roles so young. But at the same time, she's not the Hayden we know at all. The face looks built of glass , shiny and breakable. The eyes-nose are pointy--you do get a slight caracature of what she might be today, and are part right. But she also has that ultra sesitive little forehead you can't tell, from Dust Factory, Ice Princess, Heroes, that she once had had. The eyes were different than you could have guessed. It is wonderful to see a small Hayden's teeny tiny hand going into an adult's much bigger one, and it's just slender Ally Walker's, because Tom Amandes can't see her.

Maybe it wasn't the best American movie made it's year (1999) or in it's half-century. But if its what we've got of Hayden where she was ever, ever different from the way she's always been -always will be, then we will watch it over and over like the fans that we are.
it would be nice to have the three stars in a 3-way group, Scarlett, Reese, Hayden, with their "lost personalities" -the pre-adolescent/adolescent thems and the queenly thems."If you believe" does show Hayden's "lost personality" that she can't get into smaller clothes and become her little self again.

If you didn't notice, on Heroes, when she was playing a young her to her dad's younger him , she couldn't even take herself as far back as "The Dust Factory" in looks--she had to go with the Saturday Nite Live skit style and do her hair in big bows in pigtails to look younger--her hair naturally off her face, pulled back and in curls like in "The Dust Factory" must be harsher as her optimizing genetics shape her face strongly for her sons to follow her male linage in appearance. Such growth into bigger noses, longer jowls, being normal- youth is a special, shone-upon by the heavens time.

But Hayden can't go back to her child, and rightly, now and give us the child. She shines so much in "If You Believe". If that's the only place we'll see her, I'll watch it 52 times a year. I like the little Hayden that much.
She's not the only one with a predicament to their filmography.

A beautiful child made a beautiful movie with Anthony Quinn, the two characters secretly(actually, just quietly) loving each other, for she was ten years old. He was a bad pirate on the seas looking for the love that would not end, his love for her caused him to do the last thing he did. I can only think it was quickly washed under the table by people thinking it celebrated wrong things. it was harmelss, it was about pure love. It vanished. The little girl never really got any more roles.


That's what makes the fact that Reese, Scarlett, and Hayden did, so good. They did their best work,and then they did 30 more things, and more best work. When they couldn't go back and wear the pensive girl face, all three were able to, for all are still girls, just not the ones they once were. Not on the outside.
With Reese, we saw her range--"Freeway" so quickly after the babe in the woods in "The Man in the Moon"; "Election", El Woods the law student, "Walk the Line". Just need to see her raving mad.

Scarlett, impressive--"Lost in Translation" showed her genius, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" her strentgh and determination and willingness to submit, "A Good Woman" her timeless, legendary beauty--she will always be one of the beauties--and look how young she is.

Hayden isn't Hilary Duff and thank goodness. Her high school characters internalize as well as externalize--she's played girls with secrets to themselves as well as ones who've had to share with everybody. She can do airhead, she can do beyond airhead. She has shown some range but needs to change her look completely and "be' someone totally different than a girl evolving around high school now.I'd love to see her re-do an old 50's movie about a boxcar hopping guy and girl. All girl, no superwoman.

But whatever she does, we have "If You Believe" to bookend one end of her filmography, and it seems to be the only contender for the spot. Anyone know of a movie that feaures Hayden when tiny? If not, it will do. I loved that little nut in it.