In Little Children, Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is a suburban
outsider who, after long days at the local community pool
with her child, soon becomes acquainted with
local husband and father Brad (Patrick Wilson) - who seems to share in
her seething discontentment with life in their quaint commuter town. An
English literature major who never imagined a fate as a soccer mom,
Sarah has a growing dissatisfaction with her successful husband that parallels Brad's increasing frustration with his inability
to pass the bar and connect with his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a
successful documentary filmmaker. It's not long before the dejected
pair is meeting for a series of illicit afternoon trysts as their
unsuspecting spouses work and their children lie quietly napping.
Meanwhile, the community is riled by the return of convicted sex
offender Ronald James McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley) who leaves the concerned parents
scrambling to protect their young ones.
A movie like this, in the hands of the wrong director and writer, can wind up as pretentious, melodramatic crap. However, co-writer/director Todd Fields (with screenplay help from Little Children author Tom Perrotta), having co-wrote and directed the fantastic In the Bedroom, is no stranger to taking seemingly normal suburban families and turning their lives upside-down. Here Fields's direction is once again spot on, providing us with so much in spite of very little dialogue at times. What Fields has done has taken characters we wanna like and made them rather unlikeable, almost despicable at times. At the same time, we also get a child molester, superbly acted by Jackie Earle Haley (who also starred with Wilson in Watchmen) in a comeback role, that we wanna despise, yet can't help but feel sympathy for. It's more than a tricky task trying to make a child molester role appear sympathetic, but Haley, under the direction of Fields, pulls it off. It's not that we sympathize for the man. We sympathize what he's going through - a man trying to move on from his dark past - and even what his own mother has to put up with. Overall, Little Children is an often times satirical look at hypocrisy within a suburban community. Sarah and Brad and all the superficial soccer moms can point their fingers and demonize McGorvey all day. To be fair, if you're a parent, can you blame them? When Sarah and Brad are behind closed doors, though, and making up for their own loveless marriages by banging each other - while their own children are in the room next to them - you realize they're not without sin either. Oh, far from it. This isn't quite on the level that another suburban mid-life crisis film before it, American Beauty, is. That being said, it's still a damn good film, with an all-around fantastic cast, that takes a look at the lives of those that seem happy and normal, but are just as empty and sad as the very people they look down upon.
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