Little Children


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Written (by Todd Field and Tom Perotta, after his novel) with a tsk and a supercilious smirk and directed (Field, again) by a pointed finger wagging, Little Children is a cinematic sermon hard to sit for.  Overlong at two hours and ten minutes (one is reminded of Mark Twain’s musing that no sinner is ever saved in the first 20), it takes its time to build to the height from which it finally, and most haughtily, condescends. In the meantime, it scathes its way through summer parks, pools, playgrounds and middle-class bedrooms (locating its devil in the details of suburbia), sneering and sniggering and smacking its lips in anticipation of the fall. Wholly despicable in its self-important self-contradictions, it shakes its head in disdain and disgust as it delights in dirty jokes (a grown man sniffing hungrily at pre-worn panties on his head) and dirty deeds (hard bodies pressed hard against each other), indulging itself as it preaches self-denial, like the proverbial priest pawing the choirboy behind the church pulpit.   Perhaps fittingly, the character for whom Little Children has the most sympathy is a predatory pedophile.

In the beginning, though, beyond the credit-roll pan of the home in which he lives with his mother, the camera salivating over the fragile porcelain figures of children lining the numerous shelves to which it will later return (the better to hit you over the head with, my dear), the pedophile is just an idea—the obsession of an ex-policeman with a regrettable past act (Noah Emmerich as Larry Hedges), and the bane of the stay-at-home mothers who prattle in the park.  Among those mothers, would-be anthropological observer and outcast Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), disheveled and disorganized, laments her flawed feminism and her abandoned academics. A sardonic and erratic voice-over, effecting one of the film’s many literary aspirations (it disappears and reappears according to the filmmakers’ convenience), sets us up to identify with her, if only so it can slap us harder when she is hit with the film’s moralistic conclusions. 

Sarah is the film’s Madame Bovary (another aspiration exposed, this time in explicit reference borrowed from the source novel’s multiple, and unearned, pretensions), unhappily married, made unhappy mother and seeking solace in an illicit affair. Discussions in the film on the novel, which have women characters debate whether Emma was a slut or a feminist, or whether the latter presupposes the former, suggest that neither Field nor Perotta has deeper than a Cliff Notes’ grasp of the French text—and that even with that they manage to betray it in their faux sophisticate unraveling. In the end, they judge their modern day Emma in ways that would have made Flaubert cry.  But Winslet is an absolute delight, giving both Sarah and Emma their due and making sense out of the nonsense the filmmakers have concocted.  She creates a living, breathing, luminous woman from the ludicrous limning that they have provided.  She single-handedly gives the film a greater force than Field and Perotta might otherwise have achieved alone or together.   (An impression left by the film, this was made evident in the course of a press screening in which Field responded snootily to a question regarding character motivation (“well, what happened in the scene right before that,” he struck at the questioner like an impatient grade school teacher, before exasperatedly explaining something that was not in the film’s logic), only to have Winslet respond later, briefly and with clear focus, what she understood and intended in the scene—an explanation that fit.)

Patrick Wilson (himself a pedophile in Hard Candy) is not required to do quite as much with his Brad Adamson, Sarah’s partner in crime, but he comes through as required to make likable a character the film ultimately disdains.  A deliciously handsome stay-at-home dad the other moms call the “Prom King,” the film mocks him for his inability to pass the bar, his submissiveness to his Alpha wife (a harpy Jennifer Connelly, poorly served by her role), and his succumbing to the ostensibly uncharming charms of Sarah (unpersuasively dowdy given Winslet’s persona, she is made, at worst, a tad bit awkward).  It is, in this, remarkably not just sexist, but machisto.

Sweaty scenes, in which the film revels with us, aside, Field and Perottta condemn the soon indulgent lusty lovers for their unwillingness to transfer their faith in potential from their own lives to their children’s (or so the press notes say, and so the film reveals).  Their support of each other, their enjoyment of each other’s joys, these are things they must be made to grow out of.  Adulthood is serious business in the view of this film, bad marriages things to be suffered stoically.  And what parents owe their children is at very least the sacrifice of everything they ever were and ever wanted (the film’s only ideal parent is the sex offender’s mother, named May, as in Robeson, because she gives herself, life and death, to her demon-possessed offspring at the expense of all others).   Disconnected, discontented souls coming together on a kiss and a dare, Sarah and Brad are the unsaved sinners at the center of this sermon.

And what of the actual criminal in their midst?  Pedophilophobia so five minutes ago, I guess, the press notes tell us that we are supposed to see the already convicted ill-deed doer not as a real threat to the community, but rather as a sort of Grendel among them, “a receptacle to rationalize . . . fear and desire without self-examination.”  (One can only imagine that if asked, these grad-school arrested philosophizers would claim that the frequent references to castration (at least three in the film’s first 30 minutes) mark not a puerile obsession with things penile, but just a high-minded allusion to the monster’s sword-wielding severed arm or his Beowulf-beheaded corpse.)

Jackie Earle Haley, grown up among the Bad News Bears, plays Ronnie J. McGorvey as a grotesquely skeletal monster of a manchild, snivelly and ominously odd.  Recently released from prison, he is no less disturbing when he whimpers “Mommy,” than when we hear him masturbate to the squeaking springs of a parked car.  All the same, god-figures Field and Perotta judge harshly those who would judge him, for though he would molest our children, really, is he not just a child himself, symbol for the dangers to which we subject them ourselves? Perhaps inspired by the lair of evil waters Grendel shared with his mother, beneath which, some professors say, lay dangerous and unrealized human anxiety over loss and abandonment (Grendel and his mother were descendants of the ever-ostracized Cain), the filmmakers present us with a pivotal scene at the neighborhood swimming pool.   While preening dullards and adulterous lovers delight in the sun of the day, the monster dons snorkeling gear and dives in below the surface where their children are swimming, lingering lasciviously on the children’s tiny bottoms.  When the crowd responds with communal horror, removing their little ones from the creature’s grasp and staring him down with unwelcoming gaze, the camera fisheyes them accusingly, embracing the predator, conversely, in a fishbowl effect, as a mournfully misbegotten child.  The filmmakers linger on the scene as if it were their masterpiece.  As if great meaning were to come from it.  Alas, alack, how wrong we’ve been to miss the light.  I was blind, but now I see. 

Well filmed though it is, it’s a hatefully self-impressed piece of footage.  And too self-conscious to be effective under any rationale.  The story, I’m truly sorry to say, goes from bad to worse from there, alternatingly snide and reproachful and increasingly infuriating.  By the time it ends (with a denouement we’re begged not to reveal), and despite the biblical touches, you’re more likely to want to pass the ammunition than praise the lord.

There is some coherence to the film, to be fair.  The actors acquit themselves well, though one wonders what they could have been thinking, and the cinematography is at times rather good.  Moreover, Field, who last graced us with the profoundly irritating In the Bedroom (a once ballyhooed piece of triteness now frequently seen following the short-memory-minted term “overpraised”) is well matched with Perotta, of the mean-spirited Election, a writer whose taste for snarky derision passes for sly wit among the low literati.  Both seem to believe that they are far more intelligent, moral and mature than their audience, and that we have much to learn.  And both seem convinced that the best place from which to tell a tale is on a perch looking down and over their noses.

©2006 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene