The Loneliness of Jodie Foster

When I call her performances to mind, the image is always of her face, pale and serious, in the middle of an otherwise empty frame: Clarice Starling staring down the barrel of Hannibal Lecter’s gaze, or Dr. Ellie Arroway braced inside her spacecraft in Contact. “I kill people off when I’m in the development process,” Foster said. “I’m like, Why does she have to have a dad? Why does she have to be married? ” She has a tendency, she said, to “whittle people away ’til it’s a solitary journey. I keep finding myself wanting the elegance of that.”