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Little Children

Review By: Jason Zencka
JasonZencka@TheCinemaSource.com

Before 2001, Todd Field's biggest contribution to film had been his sudden absence from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where he played the in-house piano player for an upscale New York sex-cult. Field's next appearance was his directorial debut, In the Bedroom, a film that—in comparison to Eyes Wide Shut, at least—could be aptly described as a small, good thing. In the Bedroom played like a chamber piece on grief—it was spare, difficult, and like the Andre Dubus short story it borrowed from, it was much larger than the sum of its parts. Buttressed by the performances of Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, the film was subtle enough that its meaning bled out from underneath its plot like a Rorschach blot.

For those of us who have spent the 5-year interim since In the Bedroom wondering what was keeping Mr. Field occupied, Little Children, his sophomore effort, might answer some of our questions. This isn't necessarily meant as a compliment; I only mean to say that Little Children, which premiered this month at the New York Film Festival, is a very busy movie. Like many films being heralded today as independent, it features enough serendipitously intertwining plotlines and quirky, distressed, or distressing characters to stock three or four less ambitious films. It also tosses around staple images of suburban ennui—bitchy housewives in varying states of desperation, well-coiffed dads scarfing Internet porn, overzealous middle-aged football nuts who just want to be loved—as if Hollywood was going to put a moratorium on the genre tomorrow.

None of these elements are bad in and of themselves. Well-worn plot tropes, narrative synchrony, even the workhorse theme of latent sexual deviance lurking under the grassy surface of Middle America—any of these might be bent to the service of a fine film. It's when Field tries to use all of them at once—and then tells us what he's doing through a rather incessant voice-over narrator—that he gets into trouble.

Like In the Bedroom, Little Children roots itself in the shady areas of New England domesticity where trouble tends to fester. Here, the clouds first gather at the arrival of a rehabilitated pedophile whose return to town spawns a flurry of activity from an ad hoc advocacy group. Running parallel to this storyline is a clandestine romance between Brad (Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), both of them married and dissatisfied.

These stories, occasionally dappled with further subplots, vie for space within the film's two-plus hours. Together, they drift around themes of malaise, loneliness, and what Dubus, in his story "We Don't Live Here Anymore" (also made into a fine film) described as "adult foolishness." The point being, of course, that adults are often as needy, bewildered, and generally