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Little Children – Stay At Home Dads, Moms and My Two Todds

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By: Alibastard | in: Movies |

Little Children 

You can start with the title. Borrowed from Tom Perotta’s 2004 novel of the same name, “Little Children” points us innocently enough towards the focus – these strange, unknowable creatures who thoughtlessly guide their parents through the re-animating realm of suburban desire. In the film they’re really peripheral, the kids – used by their parents often to soften endless conflicts as cute intermediaries between two conversing adults; used as excuses to assert sexual interest in those otherwise off limits (“You don’t mind if I sit here do you? Lucy’s sensitive to the sun”); used as new recipients of total affection by mothers who’ve reformed their hot longing for their husbands into fetishistic appreciation for their sons. And a literary sounding narrator guides us, the audience, in a subtly self conscious ramble, through the way in which these parents of little children display their own childlike needs, struggling innocently against their dissatisfaction in Bougie Connecticut. And, honestly, it’s pretty amazing.

Little Children

Unlike the easy, biting sarcasm of middle class America Todd Solondz-style, another Todd, writer/director/actor Todd Field, opts for more middle ground, an appeal to humanity every bit as pitiful, but acknowledging a measure of innocence, and complexity, even in the film’s obvious “bad people”. This is a trait, if we’re to compare two Todds, that Solondz would be more likely to smear with his jeering world of purposely one-dimensional miserables.
In “Little Children”, most of the characters seem somewhat blameless, and at the same time, with a degree of need that makes them both vulnerable and pitiful. Like Solondz’s human circus, these men and women are equally locked into the bias of their physiology, but seem probed beyond it, deep into the uniqueness that exists inside it nonetheless.
Patrick Wilson is a stay at home dad skipping study sessions for his law license in order to watch skateboarders bound stairs and handrails near the library. This is partly an attempt to reclaim his youthful self. The other part is it allows an easy revolt against his working wife’s need for him to be outwardly successful (Jennifer Connelly). Winslet, meanwhile, desperately juggles her child’s “unknowableness”, her husband’s internet porn fixation and her own regrets of not becoming a writer. Instead she becomes infatuated with Wilson, and the two embark on a restrained interest that soon erupts into an invigorating affair.

Little Children
Where Field’s expertise comes in is in making the perfect playdate between the pitiful and the sympathetic, the mortifying and the sincerely enjoyable. Unlike Solondz, who gives you a world entirely disconnected from you – a freak show of conventional suburbanites to smirk and point at – Field welcomes you in, inviting you into some of the character’s most prized trivialities and lurid betrayals – an amateur football game victory, an episode of sweet, pathetic eroticism. Once welcomed in, you are of course show things you do not want to see as well. Things that go far beyond the quaintly or uncomfortably familiar. But because you are sworn in with an inviting wave you can acknowledge your disturbing likeness to the characters with more willingness, allowing you to ask more questions, but still with the freedom to uncomfortably laugh, and, at times, be just devastated.

Little Children
And still, it’s not as if Field’s story fails to veer intelligently away from moralizing, which is perhaps where Solondz gets a purple star. At one point in Children you start rooting for a known sex offender, uglier than sin, who, at the insistence of his worried mother, goes back into the dating game after just being released from prison. And why not? What Field brings to life in a way that Solondz hasn’t, is the possibility of change in human beings, not as an industry standard device to turn away from 180 degrees, but as a real possibility in the human experience, worthy of exploration warts and all.


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Posted on January 21, 2007

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