Review of Little Children (2006) by Giosela T — 25 Jun 2010

The lives of a sex-offender on parole, a former cop who gunned down an unarmed teenager and two listless, overly-educated suburban adulterers become enmeshed in a taut drama that is laced with dread and downright creepiness.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is a young mother made frumpish be her husband's neglect and the routine existence as caregiver to a pre-school daughter in the bland affluence of suburbia. Brad (Patrick Wilson) is a stay-at-home father who cares for his young son while his beautiful wife pursues her career as a documentary film-maker. Having twice failed the bar exam, Brad can't find the ambition to study for another attempt. Instead of going to the library every night, he wiles away the time watching teenage skateboarders demonstrate an exuberance lacking in his own life or playing football with testosterone-drenched cops.

Sarah and Brad meet at a neighborhood park frequented by parents and their children. Quickly, they find in each other the passion they had been missing and are swept up in an illicit affair.

In a parellel plot line, a released sex-offender has returned to the neighborhood. Living with his mother, Ronny (played by Jackie Earle Haley) is an ominous and utterly creepy presence within the privileged haven of this 'Burb and is targeted by a vigilante ex-cop.

The themes of pedophilia and adultery provide an unrelenting moral tension to the film.

The three principle performances are excellent. Winslet is alternately plain and passionate. In the animation of the illicit affair she is transformed into a state of erotic beauty and her personality becomes expansive and charming. Wilson presents the portrait of a man awash with opportunity yet foundering in his own indifference and ennui. Neither adultery nor the bonding of a football league can restore the verve of the young man of promise he once was. This film and Hard Candy convince me that Patrick Wilson is an under-appreciated talent in a celebrity-mad world of mediocre screen icons.

Finally, however, it was the remarkable performance of Jackie Earle Haley as the sex offender that impressed me most. He gives us the vision of a man imprisoned by his perversions, who knows right from wrong, who deeply yearns for normalcy, yet is powerless against the unholy passion that consumes him. HIs soul is mutilated beyond redemption and his flesh is doomed to follow.

Little Children will be faulted by viewers used to the fast-paced thrillers and comedies of modern film. It is a careful examination of lives untethered from their meaning and takes the time to consider the arcs of the characters lives. The result is a thoroughly convincing and totally original of 21st century suburbia.