Desperate Housewives (Little Children (DVD))

Member Name: collingwood21

Product:	Little Children (DVD)
Date:	11/05/09 (120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great acting, writing, cinematography

Disadvantages: The ending was arguably contrived or exploitative

Little Children - FILM ONLY REVIEW

Certificate 15 (UK) / R (USA) / 16 (Ireland)
Running Time: 130 minutes


Todd Field's literary adaption of Tom Perrotta's novel is a story about American bourgeois discontent being brought to the surface by dark deeds, and the seedier aspects of suburban life that are played out behind closed doors. Don't be fooled by the title; this is a film that is anything but cute, featuring in turns internet porn, adultery, vigilantism and a host of unpleasant characters. It is partly a drama and partly a very black comedy, often being unnervingly funny despite its dark content. Betrayal, anger, guilt and frustration are often the bedrock of middle-class lives in cinema - certainly none of things are ever very far below the surface in this film - but "Little Children" deals with them in a more unconventional and intriguing way that in most other portrayals I have seen in the growing "suburban desperation" genre.

"Little Children" revolves around the lives of three central characters living in affluent small town Massachusetts. Firstly we have Sarah (Kate Winslet), an academic who has exchanged her research in literature for life as a bored housewife to the rarely-seen marketing executive Richard (Gregg Edelman) and as mother to young Lucy, a child she seems to have difficulty communicating with and often even liking. Her only adult contact during the long days when her husband is at work is the coven of small-minded, gossipy mothers at her local playground; she regards herself superior due to her education, while they feel the same way because of their smugly perfect parenting skills. It is while wishing away another dull morning at the playground that Sarah first meets key character number two, the handsome Brad (Patrick Wilson), a man with Prom King looks who often turns up with his young son, but who the mothers have not yet plucked up the courage to talk to. Not being content to merely admire him from a distance, Sarah takes the other mothers' dare to get Brad's name and number, a conversation that ends in a flirtatious kiss that makes social pariahs out of them both. Brad, it seems, is all too like Sarah; he was successful in college, but is now a bored, frustrated and unemployed primary care-giver to his son Aaron as he attempts to pass the bar exam for the third time, all the while living in the shadow of his successful documentary-maker wife Kathy (Jennifer Connolly). Outcast by the other parents, Sarah and Brad soon begin spending their afternoons together with their children at the local pool, growing closer as the hot summer wears on, with only the threat of key character number three, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) to intrude on their dreams. It is Ronnie, a man recently released from prison for exposing himself to a child and the subject of a local hate campaign, who raises this story above a conventional tale of sexual morals.

The introduction of Ronnie, while first seeming like a distraction in what appears to be a straightforward tale about the destructive power of lust, gradually builds to add an extra dimension to the narrative that becomes increasingly important as the film progresses. The vigilante campaign against him organised by the middle-class residents of the town adds a layer of fear and mistrust to the proceedings, helping to undermine the perfect facade of the suburbs even further than the threat of adultery does. Parents cling protectively to the children from whose lives the adults' sense of self-worth seems to hang by the slenderest of threads. The pivotal scene where Ronnie appears at the town pool and all the parents drag their children from the waters provides a moment of panicking chaos not seen since jaws was last spotted heading for the beach. One of the small successes of the film is to make you realise that Ronnie is a child as much as those he scared from the water; it is a portrayal that while not sympathetic manages to a degree to be empathetic, showing a claustrophobically barricaded world for the released offender. You won't like Ronnie - indeed you will find it hard to like any of the adults in this film - but most people will be able to feel a degree of pity for him and more still for his long-suffering mother, his only friend and defender in this world.

All the actors were for me well cast, and did an excellent job in bringing these unlikeable people to life. I was in particular impressed with Winslet's performance as woman driven out of her mind with first boredom and then lust; she could easily have made the character pathetically desperate or sluttish, but instead gives us someone all too real, whose motives and actions you can understand if not condone. When discussing "Madame Bovary" at a book group, for instance, she shows Sarah clearly recognising herself in the novel and you can't help but smile as she changes her interpretation of Emma's action from the college-held opinion that she was unquestionably wrong to a new view of the protagonist's adultery as "something beautiful and heroic". Sarah is not stupid and can doubtless tell that her downfall and tragedy will come as much as Emma Bovary's does, but she and Brad have the emotional immaturity of toddlers in wanting their pleasures now and ignoring the price they will have to pay in the future.

The film is also set apart from the norm by the fact that it has a narrator. Not a character voicing their inner thoughts (as is successfully done in productions such as "Dexter", for instance), but rather a nameless and seemingly omnipotent observer whose dry and witty commentary on the actions of our three leads is a fairly unusual device in modern film-making. I suppose the most obvious parallel to make is with "Desperate Housewives", which also uses a narrator in a similar setting, but the use of it in "Little Children" is far darker, providing revealing little insights into the characters' inner worlds that would normally stay completely hidden from view. I really liked this aspect of the film and felt it added an extra little something - I wondered, actually, if it was a way of using lines straight from the novel that would otherwise be hard to incorporate into a film - but it was an elegant way of showing us just what the characters were really like, rather than just the face they presented to the world and each other.

"Little Children" is in total an excellent film that I in part liked and in others loved. It is unsettling stuff (I think some viewers will find it outright disturbing), but I do like good black comedy and found the humour in this film to be satisfyingly witty without tipping over into the realm of the too-smug-for-my-liking "American Beauty". The acting and writing was great, and the cinematography, like our lead couple, was stunningly beautiful. I find it hard to come up with any serious negatives for this film, and if pushed could only say that the musical score did not stand out as anything very special and the ending was arguably contrived or exploitative, but I find it hard to fault the rest of this film. As director, Field manages to keep the film remarkably objective in that while it watches people making judgements and pointing the finger at others, it never passes any moral judgement of its own. The morality is blurred and we are left to make up our own minds: everyone in this film has their dark side and seems to be seeking redemption for past mistakes. All the adults we see are as much the "little children" as the kids in the film, and "children" in all the guises and meanings of the word - as someone immature, as something to be protected, in behaviour and in lack of regard for others - are truly what this film is about. I don't think I have ever watched a film where such thoroughly unlikeable people can be so entertaining, but however much you dislike them, it is hard to turn away. It was complex, thought-provoking cinema, and comes recommended from me.


www.newline.com/properties/littlechildren.html

Summary: American Beauty meets Desperate Housewives