Little Children: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

A good deal of Todd Field’s terrific, satirical new drama, "Little Children," features adult characters who behave like the very worst sort of children — bullying, aggressive, selfish, judgmental. Yet the way Field exposes them here makes for an insightfully dark, often very funny experience.

The film, which Field ("In the Bedroom") and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta based on Perrotta’s scathing novel, vilifies suburbia and its inhabitants, kicking each to the curb. The movie doesn’t especially like people, though it also doesn’t sink the nail into humanity’s coffin the way, say, a Todd Solondz movie would.

The film stars Kate Winslet as Sarah Pierce, who is something of an outsider in her cozy Massachusetts hamlet. Unlike the three pious mothers who frequent the same neighborhood playground as Sarah and her daughter, Lucy (Sadie Goldstein), Sarah isn’t conventionally pretty and her parenting skills are on the downside of questionable. While it’s true that her husband is successful, the idea that Sarah failed to achieve her Ph.D. in English keeps her on this particular society’s fringe, which is exactly where Field wants her.

Joining her there is Brad (Patrick Wilson), a stay-at-home dad and aspiring lawyer who twice has failed the bar exam. He has a "knockout" wife in Kathy (Jennifer Connolly), who makes successful PBS documentaries about abused children, yet in spite of having the sort of athletic good looks that win him a nickname "The Prom King" from the three frustrated playground mothers who ogle him, he and Kathy exist in a passionless vacuum. They have no sex life.

Since this also is the case for Sarah, whose husband is enthusiastically addicted to Internet porn, she and Brad naturally are drawn to each other in ways neither can explain. When one of the mothers dares Sarah to "get his phone number," itself a childish convention, what Sarah and Brad recognize in each other is that wounded part of themselves. A kiss ensues, a heated affair follows, neither without its share of danger, drama or ramifications.

Brad and Sarah are so emotionally adrift and unsure of themselves in their own skin, they tend to parrot the culture surrounding them, if only to give the illusion that they are anchored in this world, which itself is an illusion.

For instance, when the convicted neighborhood pedophile Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley, excellent) decides to take a dip in the local pool to catch a snorkled glimpse of all those swimming children, you sense that Brad and Sarah’s horrified reaction is more a study of horror than real horror. Since they, too, have felt the sting of being ostracized by this hypocritical crowd of shrieking onlookers, they relate with Ronnie on some basic level.

They particularly feel for him when he’s hunted down by ex-cop Larry (Noah Emmerich), who harasses Ronnie and his worried, elderly mother (Phyllis Somerville) until the situation implodes, as it must, into deadly self-righteousness.

Throughout, the story is highlighted by Will Lyman’s withering narration, which is a key element to underscoring the film’s dark overtones. While Lyman’s voice hardly is the voice of reason here, it does court a detached bemusement that allows the film to further sharpen its already cutting wit and, more importantly, to turn on every light in this stunted bedroom community.

Grade: A-