Review of Little Children (2006) by Markb. — 03 May 2007

The Godfather (a little), Gone with the Wind (quite a bit), Jaws (infinity plus one)...and Little Children. What've they all got in common? These are all examples of books whose movie adaptations actually beat the odds and improved on them.

Tom Perrotta's contribution to the "let's visit High Property Values Heights and peek behind the doors to see all the hidden spiders and skeletons" genre is readable but falls prey to all the stumblingblocks inherent in its subject matter: its satire is leadfooted and overstated, it replaces genuine feeling for the plight of its characters with a smug, superior attitude toward them, and in general the novel makes most of the mistakes that the haters of American Beauty unjustly accused that film of making.

The fact that Todd Field (In the Bedroom) works so effectually with Perrotta and his source material, managing to sweep away most of the detritus to echo Beauty's famous "Look closer" theme is doubly impressive considering that Field audaciously dares to use (and successfully pulls off) the risky device of an omniscient narrator (Will Lyman, who proves that God sounds a lot less like George Burns or Morgan Freeman or even Charlton Heston than like Philip Baker Hall) .

In telling the story of a white-bread upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood whose comfort zone is shaken to the core by the arrival of convicted pedophile Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley, who's done a lot of living since his Bad News Bears/ Breaking Away/ Tiger Beat days and whose emaciated countenance is totally contrary to Perrotta's physical description of him), Field effectively fleshes out and humanizes most of the characters, with McGorvey being the major beneficiary: a contrived whodunit angle is wisely dropped altogether, and the drastic move McGorvey makes to scare off a potential girlfriend (the great Jane Adams, demonstrating what her forlorn character from Happiness is most likely going to end up like a few years later) that he knows he'll never have a future with is done out of compassion rather than deliberate cruelty.

He's a monster who knows he's one. McGorvey manages to be both a central character and a peripheral one: the movie's true focus is on the lonely, unhappily married and intellectually unfulfilled homemaker/ mother Sarah's affair with the equally frustrated "Prom King" Brad (Patrick Wilson), a househusband whose filmmaker wife (Jennifer Connelly) loves him but treats him with unconscious condesension.

All the performances are highly praiseworthy, but with all due respect to Helen Mirren's superb work in The Queen, this should've been Kate Winslet's Oscar year: without sentimentalizing Sarah at all, she gives her a fierceness, an intelligence and a dignity that Perrotta largely denied her.

..and she does for a blood-red bathing suit what Marilyn Monroe did for a white halter dress in The Seven Year Itch. (The first person who disses Winslet's healthy figure and her admirable willingness to enjoy a serving of fish and chips every now and then gets a bucket of unbuttered popcorn lobbed at them from my section of the theater!) One thought about the title: "Little Children" has been widely thought to be an inference that the suburban parents depicted are more childlike and childish than their toddlers, but it occurred to me that it could also be an oblique reference to a mid-1960s British Invasion Top 40 single of the same name by Billy J.

Kramer and the Dakotas in which the narrator would love to go much further with his inamorata than he's able to because those damned little kids are constantly in the way.