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by drawkward86
Fri May 07, 2010 7:54 am
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: Little Children
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Views: 4866

Little Children

As always, spoilers are everywhere.

Little Children, more than anything else, is a picture I appreciate, and I think what I appreciate about it most is its eagerness to explore territory usually ignored by filmmakers. I realize that ‘exposing’ the dark underbelly of suburbia is something of a film cliché now, thanks mostly to American Beauty and, to a far lesser extent, movies like it. What I mean is that Little Children shares none of those films’ intention of producing an exposé of the cold, hard truths of suburban life. This is a picture that understands that its audience already knows that nothing in a quiet, well-kept suburb like East Wyndam, Massachusetts is as content as it seems from the outside, and so doesn’t pretend that it has anything to teach us in that regard. I appreciated this especially since I grew up in a suburb much like the one in the film (though perhaps a little more conservative, a little less tasteful, and certainly more Midwestern), and saw its lifestyle and the mood of the surroundings better represented than I have anywhere else in film.

The choice to open the film with a local television newscast reporting on the town’s shock and outrage at a recently released sex offender moving to this “formerly tranquil community” might serve as a comment on that. Like the last film I wrote about, In the Name of the Father, one of this picture’s most prominent themes is the hypocrisy inherent in public opinion, although it addresses it on a much smaller scale and, consequently, with far greater precision than that film did. The joke here — and in this wry movie there’s no assuming that even the most serious scene doesn’t have a joke at its core — might be that, although we the audience know that, behind the requisite manicured lawns and colonial facades of a town like this, tranquility is nigh impossible to find, the town’s residents, clutching their children to their chests and grimacing at the reporter in disbelief, seem completely oblivious. One of the many truths about upscale suburban life that this film recognizes is that people move to places like this because, even if they’ve seen American Beauty, they’re still willing to buy into the bullshit about why life here is so idyllic — because, I mean, hey, even if your marriage fails and your life becomes a meaningless parade of soccer practice, bake sales, and SUVs, the schools are good and there’s no crime (assuming you don’t count the drug use) — so how did they let this guy in? He might expose himself to your kids or even molest them, but what seems to be outraging these concerned citizens the most is that they’re getting such a shitty return on the investment they made when they schlepped here and bought the house, or when they had the kids in the first place. So the first of many public hypocrisies this picture is going to lay out for us is shown in this opening telecast, and it’s one that we’re about see manifest in the struggles of the film’s heroine — how well you treat, or even love, your children isn’t nearly as important as whether or not you can be seen to provide the kind of life they’re expected to have here. If this perv can just waltz in and set up shop down the street from a playground or a community pool, what was the point in taking out that mortgage or paying for that after-school ballet class? The hundreds of title characters who populate this film struggle to find a voice in it because their frustrated parents, for whom they seem to function as little more than tiny ego facsimiles, are too busy speaking for them. This misplaced outrage sets the tone for the rest of the film, and Little Children can even seem a little mean-spirited at times, since its characters seem almost never to be let in on the joke, and when they are, they’re certainly not amused, since, as it turns out, it’s on them.

The characters in Little Children are identifiable, but they’re not the archetypes represented in and, in a sense, created (at least in the public consciousness) by American Beauty. No one in Little Children — significantly, I think — is undergoing anything that could be accurately labeled as a mid-life crisis. The characters are too precise to be labeled that way. There is no repressed, calcified, image-obsessed wife; no repressed, arch-conservative gun nut; no repressed, bored, self-loathing husband who hates his job; no repressed, parent-hating, frustrated teenagers — in short, none of the recognizable cut-out characters we’ve come to expect from stories about unhappy American suburbanites. Instead, Todd Field, Tom Perrotta, and the cast give us an expansive range of human beings — all of them misfits in some way (with the possible exception of Jennifer Connelly’s bland, infuriatingly passive-aggressive Kathy) — who are repressed, true, but also unfailingly unique personalities who aren’t defined by their repression.

It’s also striking that the average age of the characters seems to be ever so slightly younger than we might expect — Gen-Xers who are raising children under the age of five. This is the first picture about suburbia that I know of that focuses on characters of this generation, who are just now reaching the age where they’re becoming the dominant demographic in towns like East Wyndam. The film has a noticeable absence of teenagers, although you know a town like this would be nothing without a good public high school, and probably a prep school too. The adult leads stand in for this age group, though, which is one of the insinuations of the film’s title; in fact, the only teenagers who figure in the movie at all, a skateboarding clique, function mainly as objects of identification and fantasy for the leading man. One of the most impressive things about Little Children is that these people are so believable as residents of their town, even though nothing about their personalities, or even their vital statistics, fits what we would expect of them based on their counterparts in other films. They’re a little too young, a little too pretty. But someone has to come in and take the retirees’ places, and who better than these people? It made me realize that there’s no reason a documentary filmmaker like Jennifer Connelly’s character — or even the odd child molester — couldn’t credibly be thrown in among the consultants, advertisers, and realtors who would make up 100 percent of this town’s population in another movie.

The story is centered around a half dozen or so inhabitants of East Wyndam. The first one we meet is Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), a young, grim-looking housewife with little to her name but a potent intellect, a master’s degree in literature which she’s put to no use, a much older husband who alternately bores and disgusts her (Gregg Edelman), and a four-year-old daughter, Lucy, whom she views both as an alien — “this unknowable little person” — and a leech. The film’s narrator (a device which some might find a contrivance but which I think is an asset in its sociology professor objectivity) tells you all you need to know about the kind of woman Sarah is when he says that, although Sarah doesn’t seem to enjoy any of the time she spends with her daughter — who, along with Sarah’s husband, has robbed her of her intellect, youth, and potential — she has always flatly refused to seek out any form of day care or nannying for Lucy. We might chuckle at Sarah’s misplaced pride, but it’s more than that; part of the brilliance of Winslet’s performance, and something that gets a big pay-off at the end of the movie, is the way she allows little hints of real maternal instinct to seep through her hard exterior in a way that doesn’t undermine Sarah’s bitterness. We can see from the beginning of the film — although on first viewing we probably don’t until the very end — that Sarah is actually a far better mother than she should be, or even wants to be, given that little Lucy seems more invested in the mother-daughter relationship than she does.

Sarah’s gruff encasing, it seems, is a defense mechanism against the hypocrisy and limitations of the adults who populate her life; she’s terrified of being infected by them — not only her husband, but the other housewives she spends the mornings with when she takes Lucy to the local playground. While these women, who range from hateful to merely pitiful and consider a deep spa treatment to be an “actual spiritual experience”, prattle about their children’s bowel movements and falling asleep during sex with their husbands, Sarah reminds herself to “think like an anthropologist” – she’s studying them; she’s not one of them herself.

Sarah finds something of a kindred spirit in Brad (Patrick Wilson, frequently in various states of nudity and thereby raking in major eye candy bonus points), a devastatingly but unassumingly handsome stay-at-home father who’s been nicknamed the Prom King by the playground moms who are titillated and terrified by him. Brad is also trapped in a suffocating marriage, although he seems to be in an earlier — or at least different — stage of marital discontent than Sarah. He has a four-year-old son, Aaron, and he’s much better with him than Sarah is with Lucy, though the boy still stubbornly seems to prefer his mother. He and his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) are also doing a much better job than Sarah and her husband of keeping up the pretense of marital happiness. The tension is apparent from Kathy’s first appearance though, when she arrives home from work to see that Aaron looks like he got a little sun that day; rather than address her concern about this to Brad, she says to Aaron, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “did Daddy forget the sunscreen again?” I can remember my own parents (whose marriage, of course, has long since ended) having almost exactly the same “conversation” when I was about the same age.

Kathy, probably without meaning to be, is a virtuoso when it comes to emasculating Brad, who was apparently a minor football star in college. The house’s sole breadwinner (she makes public television documentaries), Kathy packs Brad off to the library at the same time every night so he can study for the bar exam, which he’s failed twice (this is going to be his last chance, and he couldn’t care less — he never makes it to the library, preferring to spend those hours sitting on a sidewalk bench, longingly watching teenagers cavort on their skateboards). Kathy denies Brad a cell phone (hearing him test the waters at breakfast with the line “I think I’m going to cave in and get a cell phone,” as though he had any choice in the matter, is absolutely painful on second viewing once you’ve seen what goes on in their relationship), leaves him notes asking if he really needs the magazines he subscribes to, calls on her mother to perform espionage when she (correctly) suspects him of cheating, even complains about the pasta he serves when she gets home from work. Perhaps most obnoxious and hurtful at all — though the reasons why are a little vague — she puts their son on an impossibly high pedestal (though it has to be admitted that he, like the little girl playing Lucy, is painfully cute), more than once calling him “perfect.” She clearly adores him, but she doesn’t seem to mother him much, and certainly not as much as Brad, towards whom she shows no gratitude and whom she clearly thinks would serve the world — and her — much better as a lawyer than as a parent. Like Sarah, Kathy has married a man she saw as a solution, only to see him turn into a bigger problem.

But Kathy doesn’t earn our sympathies; Brad does. I have quite a few problems with Jennifer Connelly in this role; she fills it well, unpleasant enough to give Brad a plausible reason to want out, coldly glamorous in just the right way that we can believe Brad’s claim to be disillusioned with her beauty, and with beauty in general (it’s “overrated,” he artlessly tells the boyish-looking Sarah when their affair is well underway). But I’m not sure if I can stand sitting through another Connelly performance where she does nothing but look sad. It’s not her fault that the role seems to have been pretty heavily edited, but she’s got to find some variation in her choices. Everything she says, feels, registers, or expresses in this film is processed through the same filter of blank-eyed melancholy. Simply put, she’s a crashing bore. The only thing that saves her from failure is that Kathy’s one too. I might go so far as to say that this was a masterstroke of casting, making Brad seem that much more trapped, but perhaps if Kathy were someone who represented devoted responsibility without the infuriating melancholy it would put Brad’s own immaturity into greater critical relief.

Kathy is a problem as a character, though, too. Along with Sarah’s husband Richard, she seems to be the film’s one critical misstep. Kathy and Richard don’t benefit from the film’s otherwise incisive attention to character detail; they seem to exist only for the sake of being unpleasant enough to give our protagonists a good reason to sleep with each other. Kathy, at least, is given some minimal exploration, but no attention is paid to Richard, who is, in the words of one critic, “the most thankless role ever devised by the human mind.” We learn early in the film that he’s developed an obsession with an amateur internet porn star named Slutty Kay, who apparently is willing to send fans used pairs of panties for wanking purposes. It’s a pretty long, involved sequence, but once it’s over we barely see Richard for the rest of the film, so why spend the time? If it’s an attempt at satire, it falls flat, and is totally unnecessary, though I think it might still have worked had we been allowed to get to know Richard. Apparently he’s a more important character in the novel, but this film’s already over two hours long; if Field and Perrotta chose him as the character to leave out, why not have some balls and do it entirely? He probably would have been more effective if we never saw anything of him except his dormant shape in bed next to Sarah, and got our only account of him from her. It would have made sense, since the narcissism Sarah has to overcome is arguably the film’s single most important character conflict.

And then there’s Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley). Ronnie’s just been released after serving a prison sentence for exposing himself to a minor, and he’s moved in with his mother May (Phyllis Somerville) in East Wyndam. Haley deserved all the attention and awards he got for this performance — he slides so imperceptibly between the sickness that he can’t escape and the role of normal citizen that he’s trying so desperately to play, that by the time you realize which one he’s slipped into it’s likely he’s already moved back to the other. May is the only person Ronnie can be honest in front of, not hard to believe because she’s played with such breathtaking assurance and warmth by Somerville, who gives my favorite performance in the film. To her credit, in my memory her role seems much bigger than it actually is, since it’s her flinty spirit that seems to hold the film together, even though she doesn’t appear until an hour in.

If Little Children can be said to have a hero, it has to be May, since it’s thanks to her that Ronnie is, ironically, the only child who is unconditionally loved by his parent in the film. It’s all the more remarkable, since she’s unable to fool herself about him; even more to her credit, she can’t bring herself to be dishonest with him any more than she is with herself. See the scene where he challenges her to come up with those attributes of his that would look attractive in a personal ad; she has to think for a moment, but she manages to come up with three that are all true — he has a nice smile, he always eats what she puts in front of him, and he’s trying to get back in shape. “Young man,” she calls him; she worries that he won’t be able to take care of himself when she dies (“You’ve never washed a dish in your life!”); but she refuses to patronize him. She loves him too much.

May and Ronnie are an older, warped, but ultimately more positive reflection of the other parent-child relationships in the film. It’s a hard truth to accept, but it’s an essential one, something that Sarah realizes when she finally comes face-to-face with Ronnie in private after May’s death — “She loved me,” he says. “She’s the only one.” Sarah’s immediate instinct upon hearing this is to run to her daughter and beg forgiveness from the four-year-old, no longer an “unknowable little person.” It’s too bad that the film follows this moment of extreme emotional power with an unnecessarily sensationalist turn of events for Ronnie, when we might have easily and pretty effectively just left where he was, but I’ll take what I can get when the moment’s this good.

But Ronnie, worthy of sympathy though he may be, is no hero; we’re shown, in what is possibly the film’s most uncomfortable scene (a true honor in this movie that is a symphony of awkwardness), that the perceived threat might be real; he was, after all, put in jail for a reason. Ronnie stands alone at the center of the film’s sharp critique of mass hysteria, with practically the entire town of East Wyndam baying for his blood, as Emma Thompson’s lawyer in In the Name of the Father would say. But, like I’ve already said, this film’s observations about the mob mentality are more incisive than that one’s, which saw none of the irony in its easily persuaded masses. Little Children sees the town’s wave of anti-Ronnie sentiment as a defense mechanism of people who have spent so long obsessed with their exterior lives that they’ve become terrified to examine their interior ones, and use scapegoats like Ronnie to distract themselves from the unpleasantness therein.

It’s perfectly represented by the reaction of Sarah when she is the first to see Ronnie enter the protective confines of the municipal pool; already at this point in the film she’s expressed skepticism toward everybody else’s opinions of him, correctly believing herself to be more discerning than them, more willing to see the moral gray areas in a situation like Ronnie’s… but when she sees him slither into the pool, goggled and flippered, she recoils and even clutches Lucy instinctively to her chest. She and Brad keep a telling distance from the rest of the mob, who have fled screaming from the pool (in a scene that’s a clear — and apt — homage to the analagous scene in Jaws) and are now lining the deck, staring at the lone Ronnie, but she can’t help being pulled into the crowd’s perverse fascination.

Brad is a little more willing to express his disgust for and fear of Ronnie on behalf of his child, but it still comes off as nothing more than lip service. After all, he only joins the Committee for Concerned Parents, the meetings of which apparently all take place between him and his ex-cop friend Larry in the latter’s van, so he has an in for the local touch football league. And when he half-heartedly comments to Kathy that it’s unsettling to have “a pervert like that” living so near the kids, she matches his insincerity with a flat “I don’t even like to think about it.” It’s pretty clear that Kathy just doesn’t think about it, period. And it’s just about the only good line reading we get out of Jennifer Connelly in the whole picture.

There’s one key character I haven’t gotten to yet, and it turns out that Ronnie’s got some stiff competition for the title of most pathetic and unhappy in this movie. Larry (Noah Emmerich) is a puzzler — on the one hand, Emmerich’s performance is another very good one. He’s funny in all the right places, not least because he has the most difficult aspects of the character down pat: the self-loathing, the frustrated hetero-crush he’s got on Brad, the thinly veiled sexual inadequacy. He’s so good, in fact, that the revelation that he’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder seems almost unnecessary; I’m no expert on the condition, but I could have guessed it far before he admits it. But the character often verges on the ridiculous; though it could probably be forgiven its flirtation with the line since it manages to skirt it so artfully for almost the entire movie, his moment of redemption at the end, where he saves Ronnie’s life after inadvertently ending May’s, lies totally outside the realm of believability.

Larry, disgraced in his job (he’s an ex-cop forced to retire early — very early — after inadvertently shooting an unarmed child to death at the mall), disgraced in marriage (his wife leaves him after he calls her a fucking whore in front of the kids — “I guess I was in a bad mood,” he explains to Brad), and disgraced in manhood (“I’m slow and I’m fat,” he moans to Brad after their first football game), has decided to redeem himself by creating the Committee of Concerned Parents, handing out flyers displaying Ronnie’s photo headed with the insipid demand “ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE?“, parking outside Ronnie’s house and honking his horn to let him know he’s “keeping an eye on him,” even ringing the doorbell maniacally in the wee hours of the morning so he can harass Ronnie and May face to face. May, as we hope and expect, fends him off valiantly. He proudly proclaims to Brad that “I am that committee,” but rather than an expression of power it’s an expression of crushing impotence; we see that the statement is, sadly, literally true when he unsuccessfully tries to recruit his uninterested teammates to the cause. Emmerich’s performance is a virtuosic display of crippling insecurity, and his extremity does more than etch his character; it puts the whole town’s hysteria, albeit uncomfortably, into a specific context.

And yet, despite all this richness of character and detail that abounds in the movie, any discussion of Little Children has to center on Sarah and Brad. Their relationship isn’t really the important thing here; they don’t really have much of one to be honest, something they both realize independently in the film’s closing minutes, and the fact that they don’t end up together seems pretty much inconsequential — it’s also one of the things that makes this film feel more grown-up than the lovely but easy moralizing of American Beauty. What is important about how these two relate to one another is what they represent about what the other is looking for.

My two favorite scenes in the film relate directly to this and mirror each other. While Brad has his football team, Sarah’s bizarre experience of same-gender bonding comes at a book club she’s been recruited to because they’re looking for younger members and she unwittingly mentions her literary expertise to an older friend during their nightly power walk. Unbeknownst to her until she shows up at her first meeting, the other new recruit is Mary Ann (played with cunty gusto by Mary B. McCann), Lord High Queen Bitch of the playground moms and introduced very early in the film as somewhere in between foil and arch-nemesis in her relationship to Sarah. The women are reading Madame Bovary — Sarah, of course, with her grad school credentials (which Mary Ann makes no attempt to hide her contempt for), is the only one who really understands the novel. It’s one she claims not to have liked when she read it at school, but this time she says she “fell in love” with the title character. If you know the novel (and even if you don’t), it’s clear that the connection’s not subtle, but it’s a point worth making, and we’ll shortly see why.

Mary Ann, dense and deeply insecure, one of the unhappiest and meanest characters I’ve ever seen portrayed on film, hated the book. She can find nothing to say about it except that Madame Bovary is a “slut” (incidentally provoking my favorite line in the film from one of the older book clubbers), but cleverly (for her) she finds a way to upbraid Sarah for the adultery she and the other housewives assumed took place after witnessing her kiss Brad during their first meeting at the playground, after a dare for Sarah to get his phone number got a little out of hand when Sarah suggested an innocent hug in an attempt to “really freak out” the other women. Mary Ann has no evidence of wrongdoing other than the kiss, but she doesn’t need it, and she goes on, relishing her description of Emma Bovary as a “pathetic” woman who “degrades herself for nothing.” These thinly veiled accusations are interwoven with shots, perfectly judged in their level of graphicness, of Sarah and Brad having sex, and we see Sarah alternately abandon herself to the sheer bad-girl delight of it all, then fall prey to her own insecurity and curiosity when she demands to know from Brad whether Kathy is pretty (this is the scene of his devastating reply — “She’s a knockout. Beauty’s overrated, Sarah”). Layered on top of this is the fact that Brad is tied to Sarah’s simultaneously near and distant youth (which, we’re beginning to sense, might still be intact were it not for husband and child) by the invocation of her career as a literature student; it’s a connection with no specific meaning, but as we’re about to see, it’s an important one nevertheless.

The book club scene is paralleled by the film’s final touch football game, the first that Brad and Larry’s team wins, where Brad single-handedly makes a miraculous touchdown drive that ends with him spiking the ball and raising his arms aloft in triumph. It’s the first moment of glory the movie affords him, and when he turns around he sees Sarah, alone in the bleachers, completely off her nut excited, doing an odd sort of impromptu cheerleading (it seems impossible that she would have ever even attended a football game in high school, much less cheered at one). Mirroring the book club scene, it ties Sarah to the remembered glories of Brad’s collegiate past as a football player, and is the key to what Sarah means to him — no matter that she’s not as pretty as the women he’s used to, Kathy included. A lot has been made of the fact that Kate Winslet is far too beautiful for any audience to fall for the idea that she’s homely, even compared to Jennifer Connelly, and that might be true, but who cares? Beauty, after all, is overrated.

Finally, I have to pay tribute to the film’s design. The look of the film is distinctive, and just about perfect — convincingly lived-in, but hyper-clean. Sarah and Richard’s home — “an impressive piece of real estate” — is particularly well-appointed and well-shot; it looks exactly right for where a couple like them would live. The rest of the homes in the film function the same way, to varying degrees of success. The film’s many outdoor scenes — the playground and municipal pool where Brad and Sarah begin to really forge their affair — use the natural light beautifully, making their world dreamy and dappled. And notice the way Antonio Calvache, the cinematographer, draws subtle connective lines throughout the movie — in the way, for instance, that the field where Brad tries to regain his youthful glory in games of touch football is lit almost exactly the same way that the skate park where he goes to sit and fantasize. The costuming isn’t spectacular, of course, but it’s just about right on (the little crabs embroidered on Mary Ann’s J. Crew capris in the book club scene — brilliant!); notice the way the three playground moms are dressed in tops of three primary pastels, each chosen to match their hair color (we have one brunette, one blonde, and one redhead), a clever way of visually indicating their limitations.

The Bottom Line: Incisive, hilarious, observant, thought-provoking, and only incidentally flawed, Little Children is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. Highly recommended.