User Reviews

Can there be such a thing as a feel-good movie about marital infidelity and suburban ennui? If so, then I believe this haunting, powerful and superb new movie from Todd Field may be it.

A feel-good movie was not in the least what I was expecting from this, based on the trailers and on Field's prior film, the astringent and depressing "In the Bedroom." And it's not like I left the theatre feeling the need to break into song. But unlike other films about the stultifying atmosphere of suburban America, and the prisons so many people seem to make out of their domestic worlds, "Little Children" ends with a distinct feeling of hope and optimism. In other domestic dramas, the characters are frequently unlikable, and they appear to drift through their worlds allowing things to happen to them without taking any responsibility for themselves. In "Little Children," Field does not present us with a handful of caustic stereotypes, but rather with a cast of actors who create warm but flawed human beings. These characters don't drift through life. They have things they care about, and they want and feel that they deserve some of the small happinesses that all human beings have a right to. But they also screw up, make bad decisions, act irrationally. What saves them, and the movie, is that in the end they all wake up, realize they're chasing dreams, and decide to make something of the lives they have rather than the lives they think they want.

I thought this was a hopeful message, and one that carries with it a tremendous impact in this post-9/11 culture, when the safety nets on which we've built our existences have been ripped out from under us and we're left trying to make sense of a scary world. This film, in its closing moments, states outright that there's no time like now to begin taking control of our own worlds and making of them what we want. The best weapon we can wield against an uncertain future are our children, who can learn from our mistakes and make something new rather than simply repeat an endless cycle.

As for the acting.....Kate Winslet shines as Sarah, the suburban mom who doesn't fit in and embarks upon a reckless affair to fill a void in her days. Her performance is one of those small triumphs of acting, in which Winslet builds a living, breathing human being from the ground up through a series of subtle and thoughtful choices. Patrick Wilson, such a limp noodle in the screen version of "The Phantom of the Opera," is pitch perfect as Brad, the stud who attracts Sarah's eye. And the other actors take full advantage of their smaller roles: Jennifer Connelly as Brad's loving but distracted wife; Jackie Earle Haley as the film's most tragic figure, Noah Emmerich as an ex-cop who takes homeland security into his own hands; and Phyllis Somerville, who has a couple of beautifully heart-breaking moments as the mom of an outcast.

The screenplay is thematically elaborate. There's hardly an element of one character's storyline that doesn't find a parallel in the storyline of another. The theme of parenting is of course central, but beyond simply focusing on the responsibilities parents owe their children, the film goes deeper and examines how parents' behavior affects their children and the extent to which parents can change the world for good or bad through what they hand down to the children who inherit it.

A bracing, fantastic film.

Grade: A+

Todd Field's Little Children's screenplay was written in collaboration with Tom Perrotta, on whose eponymous novel it's based. Perrotta wrote Election's, Bad Haircut's, and Joe College's funny, ironic screenplays before this. But though mildly satirical at times in its vision of middle-class white infidelity, this second film (at last) from the director of the powerful 2000 In the Bedroom, with its themes out of Cheever or Updike, also moves toward the solemn and the shocking.

One big reason for that is a second plot about a just-released sex offender and a troubled ex-cop who turns into a self-appointed protector of public morality campaigning to drive the ex-prisoner out of town.

Brad (Patrick Wilson) is a househusband caring for his little boy while feebly preparing for his previously failed bar exams. He has a gorgeous but emasculating wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) who's a successful PBS-style documentary filmmaker. Sarah (Kate Winslet), with an MA in English, in charge of a recalcitrant little girl with whom she has little patience at times, has a well-off distant husband (Gregg Edelman) who's a pretentious adman who gets off on Web porn. Sarah and Brad meet in a park where moms take their kids, in East Wyndham, Massachusetts. They wind up kissing when they first meet, mainly to shock the other moms.

Brad and Sarah spend a lot of the summer minding their kids together at the municipal pool. This turns into a torrid affair with frequent sex at Sarah's husband's large house. They're attractive, and attracted, and their general dissatisfaction with their spouses and with where they are now heightens their need to throw themselves at each other with the utmost abandon.

Meanwhile Ronnie (former child actor Jackie Earle Haley, vividly remembered from Bad News Bears and Breaking Away and strong in a new way here) has come into town: he's the sex offender, a painfully self-aware one, and he lives with the one person who loves him, his aging mother Ruth (a convincing Phyllis Somerville), while the ex-cop, Larry (Noah Emmerich) wages his war as a one-man "committee." Larry and Brad have met and Larry persuades Brad, who already wastes time watching boys skateboarding when he's supposed to be boning up for the bar exam, to join a night touch football league team made up of cops – and thus the infidelity and the sex offender elements are linked. But they would be anyway, because this is a small community. And one particularly hot day Ronnie comes to the municipal swimming pool and causes an outcry when he's spotted ogling young girls under water.

The other moms from the park, who were afraid of Brad and called him "the Prom King," are gently satirized by a voice-over narration spoken by Will Lyman, of Frontline on PBS, which sounds like a high school educational film. Perrotta is, after all, a comic writer. But more of that later.

The movie has a bright, intense, clear visual style, sometimes making use of extreme close-ups. Since the acting and directing are fine, this gives things a feeling of authority. It's also effective in underlining both the satirical and the sensual aspects of the story, and heightens the emotional effect when the narrative lines move toward crisis.

Brad's development (the novel-based voice-over tells us) may have been arrested by his mother's dying when he was in his early teens, and this explains why he watches the skateboarding boys with such longing: they're having the playtime that was stolen from him.

Another theme is that of Cheryl (Marsha Dietlein), Sarah's friend and neighbor who baby-sits with her daughter when she's having sex with Brad, speed-walks with her, and gets her into a book-discussion group leading to a pointed scene in which Madame Bovary is discussed and Sarah defends the adulterous heroine as someone who revolted in search of freedom. The older women nod approvingly, while one of the park moms doesn't get it at all.

Partly because it's hard to juggle all these elements from a 350-page novel, the ironic narrative voice disappears throughout the film's midsection.

At the end matters all come to a head, with Brad and Sarah, with Ronnie, and with his erstwhile nemesis, Larry, and a lot of tension is created through Hitchcockian cross-cutting between these climaxing threads.

Field has avoided the extreme finale of his first film -- this one shares such heavy concerns as families, infidelity, crime, and confronting death, but by contrast, this ending, though breathless and troubling, is ultimately sweet and marked by reconciliation and acceptance. One may wonder if underlying issues have really been resolved. The film feels somewhat overlong, but the nuanced characterizations and fine acting and the attractiveness of the central couple entertain and interest us mightily.

Perhaps the one weakness overall is a slight uncertainty of tone, which explains why some viewers are troubled by the voice-over (and also by its long disappearance midway). If situations are seen primarily as highly serious or even horrifying, it's hard to see how the satirical feel fits in, and at the end we seem to have lost touch with where we started out. Ultimately as with so many American stories on film, the writers seem to have tried to tackle too much material. Nothing wrong with that, but they haven't quite got the world-view to encompass it all. Technically though Field has achieved more polish and shown more confidence, even compared to his already admirable and powerful first film of five years ago. The cast is wonderful, well chosen and well used. Field is an experienced actor: he knows the craft. This has got to be a film to think about at year's end when best lists are made up.

Bedrooms still play an important part in Todd Field universe but this time there is an outing, intellectual and emotional, that overwhelms in the apparent patina of familiarity. "Little Children" sizzles with an uncomfortable sense of impending doom. Kate Winslet, through her later day Madame Bovary, gives us a character that is recognisable and never seen before at the same time. Powerfully honest to the point of self destruction and yet, her feelings seem so clear and pure, so innocent. Kate Winslet in a superlative performance, invites us to believe that a human being can inhabit that contradiction without seem absurd. Patrick Wilson's courage without brains or vice versa is an uncomfortable pleasure to watch. Jennifer Connelly has one of the most chilling domestic moments I've seen in a long time: a moment of realisation at a dinner table. Contradictions, perhaps, are at the centre of this wonderfully conceived universe, Weary of domestic bliss. compassion for a child molester. Jack Earle Haley's psycho is not played for sympathy - he is a horrible character. He and his mother, the great Phyllis Somerville - are a realistic version of a Hitchcockian coupling. Adult entertainment, yes entertainment too, of the first order.

This is a movie about responsibility and being a grown-up that would make a 40 year old want to get a fake ID and set something on fire. It's too long, too transparent, thematically archaic and features the most superfluous narration in cinema history. There's clearly a lot of care and effort being put into this film. Unfortunately, it's all in the service of a plodding story that should have never made it to the big screen. It should have been taken out behind the barn and shot.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is a self-absorbed, inattentive, unhappy suburban mother. She treats her little daughter as a burden and views her fellow suburban moms with disdain. Sarah starts up a relationship with Brad Adamson, a stay-at-home dad with a young boy he loves very much. Brad is shiftless, insecure and wants nothing more than to be in his early 20s again. Their relationship starts out platonically intimate, but they eventually start sweating together on a mattress is Sarah's attic.

While those two selfishly yearning a-holes are carrying on, the movie follows a subplot about a convicted sex offender in Sarah and Brad's general vicinity. Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) just got out of jail for exposing himself to a child and lives with his mom (Phyllis Somerville). Ronnie is ostracized and shunned to an hysterical degree by the community. He does try to be what his mother considers a "good boy", yet he feels so doomed by his impulses that being a "good boy" consists of masturbating at the sight of a swing set.

Connecting these two tales is Larry (Noah Emmerich), an ex-cop who's become Ronnie's chief persecutor and also invited Brad to join a local touch football team. He's so plainly screwed-up from the first moment he appears, you're just left painfully waiting for Larry's secret to be revealed and let down as soon as it is.

Here's what is good about Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley gives a very nice performance and a scene with Ronnie being brutally honest with himself about his desires while his mother sits across from him in determined denial is really well done. Kate Winslet also gets naked, which is nice but not exactly unusual for her.

As for the rest of it….zzzzzzzzzzz.

I'm sorry. Thinking for this long about Little Children nearly put me into a coma. It's THAT slow, mundane and tedious. There's nothing about this tale of middle class angst that is distinctive, compelling or gratifying. Sarah and Brad are like thumbnail sketches of characters from a more interesting script. Their discontent is wearisome to watch and their big moments of self-revelation at the end are massively clichéd and downright goofy. There's also a scene involving a touch football game that goes so far beyond unintentional self-parody, it's like an unintentional self-parody of unintentional self-parody.

Little Children is an adaptation of a novel authored by co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta and their may have been something in the book that fused middle class angst and child predator paranoia in a worthwhile way. Whatever that was, though, never made it into the movie. There's far too much emphasis on the thoroughly tired and worn out story of suburban dissatisfaction and adultery and far too little time is spent with Ronnie and his mom, who are the only bright spots in this dreary, drawn out debacle. For this little parable to have had a chance, it needed someone who would have ruthlessly edited down the dull as dishwater Saran and Brad and focused more attention on the subversively engaging child molester.

Little Children is a production that started out with the wrong idea and no amount of skill or talent could make up for that narrative mistake. There are so many movies out there covering the same ground and doing it better, don't waste your time with this.

This movie does a wonderful job of representing the undertow of confusion and stuckness that threatens to pull people under. It cuts among interlocking stories that each center on someone who is about to dive down beneath their established life, and for entirely normal, believable reasons. 45 minutes into the film, all the main characters have thrown themselves into the vortex, creating the uneasy fear one feels for people who are about to risk everything they've deliberately built up in order to end a sense of suffocation that is much less concrete than the secure surface of their lives, but somehow more real. This is strong suspense film about that crucial question of whether or not our own happy lives actually make us feel alive.

The movie covers an updated version of Cheever territory - the despair beneath the comforts of American suburbia. "Little Children" is better than "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm," and is intelligent about the effects of thwarted desire in the way of Todd Haynes's "Safe." It has the eerie disorientation of "The Swimmerj" It's particularly shrewd about the original source of romantic yearning itself. The film's real "LIttle Children" are the parents from two different families who fall in love with each other. They are the stay-at-home Mom and the Mr. Mom who re-marry each other informally at the neighborhood pool where they spend every summer day taking care of their adorable kids. Together they are as bland as they are in their actual marriage. Their interest in each other doesn't unearth some suppressed power or depth in themselves, which is always the assumption behind the affair. It reflects their mutual wish to recapture the unrestricted experience they associate with childhood - no bar exams, no dissertations to finish, no spouses with budgets or habits of Internet wankfests at the work computer. You can see the affair coming with the first encounter between these two fair-haired parents who are the bored and aimless and also subordinate to their focused and competent spouses in each of their marriages. Unlike the breadwinners, these two are still looking for what they want to do in life. When they seem to find that thing in their daily poolside parenting and then later in their daily sex, they are put by the film into strict parallel with their preschool kids sharing their afternoon naps. It's a nice dream - play and sleep, play and sleep, all feeling unforced and unchangingly attractive, every day happily the same. As if.

The other true thing about the movie is that Sarah and Brad (Winsett and Wilson) resolve to run off together and then chicken out and chicken out accidentally-on-purpose, in ways that allow them to go "home" to their focused, successful spouses who are capable of taking care of them, and yet go home without acknowledging to themselves that this is what they really want. Sarah concocts a panic attack when her child wanders out of her sight for five minutes in the nighttime park where she had gone to meet Brad. Brad interrupts his trip to destiny to fulfill his wannabe skateboarder dreams, injuring his beautiful body and giving himself the perfect excuse never to try anything again. Lots and lots of us finally stand up for ourselves only to take this kind of dive right away, as soon as we decently can. One reason is that we stood up for the wrong thing, even though it took us forever to do so.

So can the problems be overlooked? Well let's inventory them. The movie polarizes straight and sensitive suburbia in a phony way. The other moms are stereotypes of sexual repression, living on the edge of hysteria. When Brad and Sarah first kiss in front of them (on a jokey dare from Sarah), the moms grab up their kids and flee just as the neighborhood moms do later at the pool when the registered sex offender is found swimming around with a mask and snorkel. The same false polarity infects the original marriages: the dominant spouses are so disconnected from their partners that you wonder how they could have been married for even a few weeks: why would a phony, money-grubbing "brander" ever have married a failed English lit PhD student, or vice versa, and why would a smart documentary maker ever marry the pretty but super-dull Brad, whose soul can be filled through the camaraderie of night-league football? In the film's clunkiest moment, Ronnie, the sex offender, has a date with an attractive, clinically-depressed thirtysomething (played well by Jane Adams), bonds with her in a sympathetic, fraternal way, and then as she's praising their conversation in the car starts to jerk off and threaten her like a possessed maniac. The moment destroys the analogy between criminalized and "normal" perversion that had helped to humanize Ronnie (his mother is the film's strongest single character, played brilliantly by Phyllis Somerville). His auto-mutilation at the end just reproduces the suburban sexual hysteria the film supposedly critiques. Equally implausible is that his tormentor, the other unloved man, ex-cop and night-league loser Larry, turns into his rescuer: this is the kind of instant redemption that the basic intelligence of this film would rule out. The problem is the film undermines the quasi-heroic struggles of their flawed main characters - Ronnie, Brad, and Sarah - so that their weak and pathetic ends make the earlier dramas seem unreal in retrospect. If they fold THIS easily, then what were we watching the previous two hours.

The men in this film - ouch. They are useless and dangerous by turns. The women are suffocated and unhappy. The American middle-class comes off badly - spoiled, unfocused, and without the strength to save itself or anybody else. We are, the movie says, the little children of world.

Life in suburbia, since Ira Levin's THE STEPFORD WIVES, has been torn apart at the seams and hung to dry. It's no secret that within every happy home (that is more than likely to be overvalued into the seven digits, depending on the city and neighborhood where you live in) there will be some drama being played out, whether it's acknowledged or not.

Long Island. The name alone evokes this kind of environment that veers towards complacency. It's where the days are long, lazy, where housewives take their babies to the parks to converge in snippets of small talk meant to prove to each other not that they're friends, but how better off one is over the other, where there might be a child molester in the midst.

The molester in question is Ronnie McGorvey, played by Jackie Earl Healey who looks unsettlingly like Nosferatu and harbors an inner monstrosity that only once peeks out and scares the crap out of a potential, yet dull date his mother has picked out for him because after all, his mother still thinks he needs a wife and why not set him on a date? No one, of course, wants anything to do with Ronnie. One in particular, an ex-cop with a dark past named Larry (Noah Emmerich), makes an obsessive issue to stalk Ronnie and denounce him to the entire neighborhood because he believes it's his duty to protect it against the ills of a sex-offender. The town doesn't really react to it, until Larry goes too far one night.

Sarah Pierce is one of the town's residents, a housewife living in sheer boredom while her husband festers in Internet porn. On a lark, she steps out of the safe haven of her "female friends", walks up to the young man they've dubbed the Prom King who later introduces himself as Brad Adamson, married to a working wife while he's a stay-at-home dad (although he has plans on returning to law, once he passes the bar, of course). Her introduction is bad enough, but when she kisses him to provoke her friends, she sets them off to a point where they ostracize her, and this converges during a heated discussion on the sexual politics of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". See, she and Brad have, from that first meet, converged again and again in the most mundane of ways, and stepped over the line, become clandestine lovers.

Todd Field's movie is elliptical. An ensemble of characters popping in and out despite focusing more attention on the characters of Sarah and Brad, it's one of the more in-depth studies of human behavior and their foibles in a gated community. These type of stories are usually rife with situations ready to be explored and while at times, the plot seems a little filled out for the purpose of presenting quirks, passions and dangerous people converge in ways that are completely believable -- don't forget, among these characters, there is a sex-offender, possibly even murderous. This is a movie that doesn't side-step its themes, and a scene where Ronnie swims, shark-like, in a pool filled with children, is truly creepy, and even more so how his character ends. LITTLE CHILDREN is a textured movie that features nuanced performances by its cast -- notably Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson who play well with each other (and look breathtaking in their nude scenes). It's best in its little scenes, especially one dinner scene late in the film where Jennifer Connelly discovers in the most off-hand of ways that her husband has been carrying on with Sarah and how she reacts to this sudden knowledge. The greatest thing about LITTLE CHILDREN is that it doesn't turn all this drama into soap: people realize that they're caught in a predicament, but don't create over-the-top scenes; instead, they react in unpredictable ways, sometimes even with compassion. It's the type of story that doesn't reduce its players to simply plot movers but actual people -- you could be witnessing the documentary of a suburb. That's good storytelling.

"Little Children" is quite simply put, brilliant. It helps that the source material is top-notch but "Little children" has a cracker of a script! While Kate Winslet, as usual, turns in a fine performance as an embittered housewife it is Jackie Earl Haley who puts in a tour de force. He practically chews up the scenery when he's on screen. I can't remember where I've seen him before, but it was a long time ago. Kudos to whoever cast him in this role. The story is a simple one and one can imagine this making a good play as the locations are simple and few. While other films make a big show about "cinematography" and special effects, "Little Children" simply gets on with what's important. Storyline. Dialogue. Acting. I can't imagine why "Little Children" was overlooked at this years Oscar. In my opinion, it stands its own against "The Departed" et al. Update: Having seen the exalted "Little Miss Sunshine" with Supporting Actor Winner Alan Arkin, all I can say is, Jackie Earl Haley was robbed!!!! What a travesty of justice!!!

Fantastic movie with layers upon layers to analyze - Acting is out of this world, but as numerous people no doubt have commented on that, I would like to direct your attention to the fantastic sound editing in this movie. Set in suburbia, where people drive to the train station, we don't actually see a train ever in the movie although one of the main characters is supposed to take the train but skips it for an adulterous affair. The Freudian connotation is obvious, but the funny thing is that the SOUND of a train is heard numerous times throughout the movie also symbolizing the desire to get away (and hop on a train). Also pay attention to the sound in the pool scenes, which makes fantastic use of the surround possibilities as do the classic scene with the numerous clocks and the scenes in the playground and ballpark. Quiet music is also used to underline subtle but poignant scenes instead of using a stupid pop song to spell out the message as is usually the case in modern movies... And last but not least the movies has the decency to know when it is time to be quiet and just observe. A movie that respects its viewers and gives you something to think about.

Gave this a watch tonight and was very pleased with it by the time the credits were rolling. As a whole the film did seem to drag on and was a definite slow watch but nonetheless, performances by the cast and the direction were top-notch. I feel -maybe- the script could have tightened just a little as during the middle section, things kind of felt like they were in limbo for a while and it really killed the pace for me. Even though I felt very little connection to the main characters, I could see where they might be coming from throughout, even if they were a tad too narcissistic at times. All in all however, I loved it. It was certainly an original couple hours for me, but probably not some that I'm going to re-live any time in the immediate future due to its rather intense emotional taxation. I recommend it to all who take film seriously though. A very memorable film for sure.