In only two films, Little Children writer/director Todd Field has established a spare, meticulous eye when it comes to suburbia — a style that gave an astounding amount of power to his first film, the revenge tale, In The Bedroom, and now lends itself nicely to the dryly comic Children.
Little Children is the second film adaptation of author Tom Perrotta's satiric novels, and like Perrotta's Election, which got sterling treatment from Alexander Payne, Children pulls no punches. The source material here, however, is far darker than Election. In exploring the lives of Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) and Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), two bored and unmotivated stay-at-home parents who have an affair primarily out of convenience, Field treats suburbanites almost clinically, going so far as to hire Cold Case Files narrator Bill Kurtis for the play-by-play.
You only need to look at Winslet or Wilson's face to see what could've been for these two had they not settled for ordinary domesticity. Winslet's Sarah is a dowdy housewife whose college days of studying literature and bisexual experimentation don't suggest the grownup mother who, as the narrator opines, now carries her child around "like a piece of luggage." While Winslet might be too attractive to be the character Perrotta described, she brings a soulfulness to the role that is both inescapable and ultimately heartbreaking.
On the other hand, Wilson's Brad would seem to have it all — the stunningly beautiful wife (a perfectly typecast Jennifer Connelly), the son that has inherited his "prom king" good looks and all the time in the world to study for his bar exam. But it's soon clear that Brad suffers from having his life planned out for him. In an interesting intersection of art and real life, Wilson, a fine theater actor whose burgeoning Hollywood career has been burdened under lofty expectations, shines as the hollowed out statue that is Brad.
Expectations could have been a similar problem for Little Children's director Field, who successfully avoided a sophomore slump by remaining true to the keen human touch that made In The Bedroom so indelible. While satires often have the tendency to turn their characters into lab mice, Field's observations are both deeply felt and all too realistic. Those abilities are what makes the film's one major concession to serving a narrative — the release of a convicted child molester into Sarah and Brad's family-oriented suburb — palatable. Interloper Ronald James McGorvey is played, with haunting irony, by one-time childstar Jackie Earle Haley, best known as pre-teen bad boy Kelly Leak in 1976's Bad News Bears. Perrotta took pains to make McGorvey more than a one note character in his book, and Field expands on the pedophile's relationship with his cheery mother (Phyllis Somerville) to make the character something other than a monster. After all, the real monsters in Field's work aren't ever actually the ones you can see.
