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Attack of the inner child

This trip to the 'burbs is hardly child's play
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Attachments come separately. Winslet and Wilson in the near-perfect Little Children.
Director Todd Field’s merciless bedtime tale of the stunted lives of suburbanites takes a new tack from other classic films analyzing exurban life (Smile, The Ice Storm), focusing on the inherent infantilization that occurs within this culture.
Within the metastasized Levittown of America, adults have been left to fantasize about, and to attempt building, the perfect childhood for their own spawn. The trumpeted benefits of raising children outside of a proper city (where they might accidentally come into contact with minorities and poverty, not to mention museums and bookshops) has led to the creation of a strange, often stultifying child-centric society, where adults are rarely ever pushed toward full maturity. Indeed, they are frequently exhorted by their fellow mommies and daddies to discover their “inner child.” They remain little children.
In this landscape for play, with its kid parks, ballparks, paddling pools and gyms, Field zeroes in on a number of individuals trapped, as if by some evil spell, in eternal mental youth. Sarah (Kate Winslet) is an outsider. A grad-school grad with a degree in literature, she decided to play the role of stay-at-home mom for her young daughter, and has been miserable because of it ever since.
Sarah feels few maternal links to her little girl, whom she often looks upon as some sort of alien. Far worse for her, however, is that she must socialize with the women around her, who are only focused on child-rearing. These playground moms trade giggling sex secrets at picnic tables while their children solemnly get on with their work in the sandbox and on the monkey bars. The home lives of these women are so barren of passion, let alone love, that they have all developed a schoolyard crush on a handsome father in the neighborhood whom they’ve dubbed the “prom king.”
The object of their affection, Brad (Patrick Wilson), takes care of his son while his filmmaker wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) works. He’s supposed to be readying himself for the bar exam, but when he’s sent to the library each night to study, he sneaks off to watch teenage skateboarders.
Little Children

Directed by Todd Field
With Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Larry Hedges, Jackie Earle Haley and Phyllis Somerville

The playground moms exhibit a maidenly shyness around Brad, which provokes Sarah to make contact with him. As is often the case with such people chanced together, a relationship blooms that surprises them both.
In this place of dampered emotions, the locals have been blessed with a scapegoat for all their internalized sexual anxieties and run-of-the-mill perversions: a convicted pedophile, Ronnie. A man well into his 40s, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) lives with his mother May (Phyllis Somerville). He also lives with the open hostility of his neighbors, led primarily by a vigilante ex-cop, Larry (Noah Emmerich), who plasters the area with Ronnie’s mugshots and drives by late at night to harass him (usually parodying a child bully’s taunt: “Is Ronnie home?”). All of these unexamined lives will collide.
Field’s film shares much with Happiness by that other Todd, Solondz. At their center, both have sympathetic pedophiles — these monsters of modern folk tales. Ronnie is actually mentally (rather than willfully) retarded, and his crimes, like those of child-man Michael Jackson, are really just the shrugged-off, fumbling sex play of boys who are suddenly deemed menacing once their voices break.
The performances are uniformly good. Winslet, an intelligent actress, strikes the wrong note occasionally, but her Sarah is finely realized. Haley’s Ronnie is mesmerizing. This scrawny, mouse-faced little man seems hardly terrorizing, and there’s a great scene where he dives into the local paddling pool for a swim, sending everyone else screaming to the sides. He bobs in the center, all alone, a sorry Jaws surrounded by fear and hatred.
If there’s a flaw to this excellent adult film, it’s with Field’s structuring and the definite tone that fails to materialize because of it. Little Children is a story told by an unseen narrator (in the wry, nicotined cadences of Will Lyman). It’s a bit of Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, an alienation device like Lars von Trier’s use of John Hurt’s mordant narration through Dogville and Manderlay.
Yet Field doesn’t follow through, and toward the end the device practically disappears completely. It’s seldom utilized for the Ronnie sequences, and so the film seems uncomfortably torn between being an ironic commentary on contemporary mores and tragedy. That’s a shame, as otherwise this film creates a perfect toy model of our times.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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