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Director - Todd Field
Writers - Todd
Field
and Tom Perrotta, based on the novel by Mr. Perrotta
Director of
photography - Antonio Calvache
Editor -
Leo Trombetta
Music -
Thomas
Newman
Production designer
- David Gropman
Producers -
Albert Berger,
Ron Yerxa and Todd Field
New Line Cinema. 137 minutes.
Rated
R for profanity, nudity, scenes of sexual content,
one violent scene.
STARRING: Kate
Winslet (Sarah Pierce), Patrick Wilson (Brad Adamson), Jennifer Connelly
(Kathy Adamson), Gregg Edelman (Richard Pierce), Noah Emmerich (Larry
Hedges), Jackie Earle Haley (Ronald James McGorvey), Phyllis Somerville
(May McGorvey), Ty Simpkins (Aaron Adamson) and Sadie Goldstein (Lucy
Pierce).
Little Children
is the second feature film from sometimes-writer/director Todd Field
(he’s mostly an actor), known for the critically adored
In the Bedroom (2001). Like
that film, Children
deconstructs utopian notions of middle class suburbia. But whereas
Bedroom was all heavy drama
and disturbed domesticity, Children
has a more ironic, caustic tone. It has been compared to
American Beauty in this
respect: a film both funny and heartbreaking, with satire and earnest
humanity woven throughout.
At the beginning
of Little Children we are
introduced to an idyllic suburban New England town upset by the
intrusion of a “just out of jail” pedophile. The audience is thus led to
believe that this film will be about the abuse and protection of
innocent little children. Early in the film we meet the antagonist in
question, Ronald James McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley),
a creepy sex offender who lives with his elderly mother. But it soon
becomes apparent that this film is not as much about the threat posed to
little children by bogeymen and pedophiles as it is about the threat
coming from their own screwed-up, morally confused parents.
The plot, guided
by the deadpan narration of Frontline’s Will Lyman,
follows two thirtysomethings —
Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick
Wilson) — who are parents of small children and somewhat frustrated in
their respective marriages. Sarah’s husband is a porn-addicted buffoon
who can’t relate to his wife’s intellectual, English-major literary
concerns. Brad’s wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), is the breadwinner of
the family and placates Brad by urging him to pass the bar exam, despite
him already having failed it twice and demonstrating no desire to
actually become a lawyer.
Sarah and Brad
meet for the first time at a park they take their respective children
to, and from there they forge a friendship based on the bond of
stay-at-home parenting. They begin to take their kids to the city pool
every afternoon, where they become more and more familiar and revel in
this innocent, open relationship of two responsible adults. Of course,
when you have two attractive adults mired in martial/sexual frustration
who spend every summer afternoon lounging together in bathing suits,
things are probably not going to stay platonic.Sure enough, Sarah and
Brad’s relationship becomes adulterous, a not-so-innocent secret they
must constantly hide from their spouses, children, and friends.
Brad and Sarah’s
relationship is the center of the film, and its progression is easy to
believe (though not as easy to sympathize with). Field offers an
interesting parallel to Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary—which Sarah defends in a ladies book club as
more than just a tawdry tale of a “slut.” Indeed, Sarah more than
identifies with Emma Bovary, who has an affair with a handsome young law
student because she is stuck in a provincial life that is providing no
other existential outlets. But Field stops short of justifying the
tryst; he simply shows how any given adulterous suburbanite might go
about rationalizing it.
Meanwhile, there
are a few other subplots that come in and out —
somewhat disruptively —
of
the Sarah/Brad melodrama. One is the inside life of the pedophile,
Ronald. In stark contrast to the passionate connection we see forged by
Brad and Sarah, Ronald’s life is about as depressing as you get. He is
constantly abused by the townsfolk, who plaster his mother’s house with
flyers and markings that denote the presence of an evil sex offender. No
doubt he is a pathetic individual, but it is still hard to see the abuse
he must take from society and also from himself. At one point Ronald
goes on a blind date (at his mother’s insistence to “like girls his own
age”) with a particularly fragile, self-conscious woman, and we almost
root for him to win her over. But the date ends in a very unfortunate
way — one of the most excruciating and sad moments of the film.
There is also
the character of Larry (Noah Emmerich of
Truman Show familiarity),
the head of the concerned parents association that heads up the
witch-hunt to demonize and drive Ronald out of town. Larry is an extreme
character on many levels, a macho ex-cop who recruits Brad to play in
his nighttime police department football league. The presence of his
character in the film —
as well as the prominence of the emotionally
remedial Ronald — serve to heighten the statement that Field seems to be
making about middle class life: it is populated with adults who are a
lot more messed up than their facades indicate.
Indeed, the
critique Field offers in Little
Children is not a critique of pedophiles, but rather the
hypocrisy of middle class adults who are floundering and destroying
their own lives and trying to pass the blame on society’s easy targets.
With the current media fixation on demonizing pedophiles (whether
priests, congressmen, or school shooters), Field’s statement is
particularly well timed. Those people are creepy and should be stopped,
certainly, but there are a lot of reckless parents out there doing just
as much damage to their kids.
The real
children of this movie are the parents and adults
— who uniformly act
irresponsibly and immaturely, in some ways moreso than their kids. The
film is full of imagery of adults acting like children. Brad plays
trains and makes whooshing
noises with his son. He and Larry spend their nights roughhousing on the
football field (in the film’s most hilarious scenes). Sarah looks
through catalogues to find the cutest swimsuit with which to attract
Brad’s eye. A group of soccer moms lust after Brad and refer to him as
“the prom king.” rad joins a group of skateboarders for and ill-fated
rail attempt… No one really acts in the interests of their children;
they act like children.
In the end, it
is the collision (Crash-style)
of various characters and plotlines that jolts these folks out of their
adolescent reveries. The film’s strongest virtue is that vice, at the end
of the day, does not prove to be as romantic or fulfilling as anything
else. Suburban life may be mundane and —
at times — soul crushing, but
sometimes you just have to grow up and deal with it.
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