Little Children

Director Todd Field certainly exceeds his 2001 full length feature debut, In the Bedroom, with this dark and tragically funny tale of suburban angst. The story (adapted from a novel by Tom Perotta) centers on the immaturity of adults in life and love and the ways in which they are defined by their relationships to children. Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is slowly beginning to resent her own child now that her distant and unfaithful husband (Gregg Edelman) has stopped helping to ease the burden of being a fulltime child caretaker. She’s become weary of the tedious daily routine she endures and aches for some time alone from her demanding daughter. She meets Brad (Patrick Wilson) whose wife (Jennifer Connelly) is equally distracted and whose life is equally monotonous. What begins as time shared during their children’s play dates evolves into an affair that shakes them both out of their boredom. These events coincide with the arrival of Ronald, (Jackie Earle Haley) a recently released sex offender jailed for indecent exposure to a minor. His presence irks the community and sends what was once a seemingly quaint suburb into a tailspin of questions, concerns, and moral upheaval.

The precise definition of morality finds itself bent and stretched over the course of the film. Neighbors instantaneously begin a brutal campaign of harassment meant to convince Ronald to leave town. Unlike the quick to judge suburbanites, the film regards Ronald as a dangerous man, but it also acknowledges that he is a person. His past is dark and dreadful, but he is still a real human being with flaws akin to the affairs and the other hidden salacious habits that exist within the community. Despite the neighbors’ insistence that Ronald is the only one amongst them with the potential to harm or offend a child, the community quickly proves to be a place where parents can do damage to their little ones as well. A distracted Sarah slowly steals away the enthusiasm of her daughter while Brad’s son is nearly abandoned for equally selfish reasons.

Winslet and Wilson are beautifully subtle in their melancholy as parents who want so desperately to be more than simply parents. They want to go beyond their roles in life and become exhilarating individuals (obvious comparisons are made between Sarah and Madame Bovary in parts of the film). It is these efforts to become as reckless and impassioned as literary characters that threaten to destroy their opportunity to live simple but happy lives.

The film passes no specific judgment on any of the involved parties, but merely exposes the flaws in the moral conduct code of suburbs like this. Neighbors all call irrationally and grotesquely for the castration of Ronald as if that would be enough to fix the brokenness of the entire town. Such a thing would not be a solution to anything at all, but only another travesty in a long line of awful things that take place here. Hopefully, they learn this in the end.

Grade: A+