Little Children (2006)

Director Todd Field and writer Tom Perrotta adapted this from the latter’s novel, thusly it has a very literary feel (strangely enhanced by the Frontline-type narration) and is reminiscent of the kind of the thing you might read in a freshman literature class. The film, as the title obliquely implies, is about emotional adolescence, featuring many characters who set themselves upon a corse for tragedy, because as the narrator tells us speaking for one of the characters point of view: “We want what we want, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

Spoiler Alert

But that’s the beauty of the story, though it builds seemingly towards one ominous conclusion, it acknowledges that much tragedy can be avoided, if we just grow up. I was impressed with this movie on many levels, technically, actorly, story structure wise, though I had been more emotional engaged by other stories which plumed similar territory (I am thinking particularly here of the work of Alan Ball), but the ending made up for that. It was like the ending of Stranger then Fiction, but without feeling like it was the deliberate and self-acknowledged cheat that movie presented (though in all fairness, the acknowledgment of the cheating is what made that ending work).

I also need to spend a moment to complement the performance of Jackie Earle Haley (with whom I share a birthday), the former child star whose more recent work (2006 and on) has been transfixing. He was one of the two most complicated characters in Watchmen (in which co-star Patrick Wilson also appears),and his small silent role in the All The Kings Men remake was for me the most fascinating part of an otherwise awful film. Here Haley is a partially reformed pedophile, one who you actually feel emotional empathy for! He still punishes himself for what he’s done (his mother describes his room at home as a self imposed continuation of his prison cell), but he’s also still tempted (his scene at the public pool). The relationship between him and his mother is the most tragically sweet thing in the film, and his dynamic with obsessive ex-cop Noah Emmerich could have been its own film.

Little Children continues my recent viewing pattern of Kate Winslet movies, and I’ll tell you that so far nothing I’ve seen here in has been anything less then a must see. 5 out of 5. In reflection the few things which I could see as possible flaws in the picture, mostly slight story omissions, are really just the movies way of not spelling everything out for us.