Little Children
Length: Single
Studio: New Line Cinema
Rated: R
Website: http://www.littlechildrenmovie.com/
Release Date: 2007-01-04
Cast: Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Gregg Edelman
Director: Todd Field
Screenwriter: Todd Field, Tom Perrotta
Music Score: Thomas Newman
WorkNameSort: Little Children
Our Rating: 3.00
Director Todd Field’s overrated 2001 debut, In the Bedroom, turned on bereft parents’ intense love for their murdered son. His second film, an even less believable intergenerational parable, is titled Little Children, but this time the kids barely matter. Two of them, pre-K-age Lucy and Aaron (Sadie Goldstein and Ty Simpkins), are merely the expedient by which their respective mommy and daddy, Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson), meet and begin an affair. After an opening tour of ceramic figures of children ‘ we’ll learn later who the collector is ‘ the action begins at the local playground, where an ironic narrator emphasizes former literature student Sarah’s detachment from her life as a suburban housewife. To shock the other mothers, all of them unconvincingly prim and parochial, Sarah strikes up a conversation with Brad, a one-time college football star who’s the town’s only stay-at-home dad. Sarah is alienated from husband Richard (Gregg Edelman), who prefers Internet porn to his family; Brad is intimidated by wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly). So Sarah joins a book group, where she explains Madame Bovary (what else?) to local matrons, while Brad relives past glory on a tag-football team. And Sarah and Brad pull each other’s clothes off every time the kids take a nap. Scripted by Field and Tom Perrotta from the latter’s novel, Little Children is intentionally very literary, with narration that sometimes substitutes for dialogue and a symmetrical structure. But feelings that might persuade on the page ‘ such as Sarah’s worry that she’s less attractive than Kathy ‘ don’t work when all the characters are embodied by movie stars. And the final bloody flourish, though arguably symbolic, plays as all too literal.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2007.