Little Children
Directed by Todd Field
Two movies opened on September 30, a slash-gorefest called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and an art-house production entitled Little Children with a prestigious cast led through its paces by an Oscar-nominated writer-director. One of these movies is so upsetting, unsettling, and unnerving that pharmaceutical companies should set up tables at the conclusion of the picture and distribute free samples of Xanax and Klonopin to calm and soothe the nerves of the audience. And it’s not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Little Children begins as a mild suburban satire, turns into a trenchant study of marital discontent, bursts into full-blown romantic melodrama, and then reaches its climax as a series of calamities threaten to befall every single person we’ve been watching for two hours. The opening scene’s knowing portrait of censorious stay-at-home moms competing in the playground for the attention of a good-looking stay-at-home father quickly gives way to scenes of husbands addicted to Internet porn, an inadvertently emasculating wife denying her spouse his subscription to Sports Illustrated, and a convicted child molester clearing out a crowded community swimming pool when he arrives with flippers and goggles.
The movie begins to create a most unusual mood–what might be called “sun-dappled dread.” The sound of a commuter train’s whistle eventually becomes Little Children‘s version of the shrieking violins from Psycho. By the time its last ten minutes rolled around, I literally found myself watching Little Children with my hands over my eyes as various characters converged in the middle of the night on the little playground where the movie began two hours earlier in brilliant morning light. I did not drop my hands until the end titles appeared.
Little Children is based on the sly comic novel published in 2004 by Tom Perrotta. But even though Perrotta is credited as the screenplay’s co-author, Little Children abandons Perrotta’s fascinating blend of sarcasm and sweetness and instead treats his characters as though they are amoebas under a microscope being studied with Olympian detachment by a particularly cold-eyed scientist. And what the scientist sees is not pleasing to him.
The movie is the second directorial effort by Todd Field, a onetime journeyman actor whose last major part came seven years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There’s a lot of disgruntled talk in film criticism circles that Field’s movie owes a great debt to Kubrick, but the plain truth is that Field is a far better and more accomplished director. A comparison between Eyes Wide Shut and Little Children is instructive. Both are studies of marital anxiety and the potential cost of infidelity. But where Eyes Wide Shut is hysterical and risible, Little Children is precise and haunting. At no moment in Eyes Wide Shut does a single character do anything a member of the audience might do. At every moment in Little Children, characters are making exactly the kinds of mistakes and engaging in exactly the kind of self-destructive behavior that bedevil ordinary people every day.
Field doesn’t let his characters off the hook. He has little patience for them. They are really the “little children” of the title, playacting at being adults. Brad, the stay-at-home dad, has failed the bar exam twice and has to take it a third time, but instead of studying at night goes and watches teenage skateboarders in desperate hopes that they will invite him to join them. Brad’s wife Kathy keeps him at a safe distance by insisting they let their young son sleep between them every night. Sarah, the woman with whom Brad has an affair, is so absorbed in her own life’s drama that she cannot spare a minute to notice her three-year-old daughter has spent the day making her a picture frame. Rather than take care of his wife and their children, Brad’s friend Larry spends his nights spray-painting the word “EVIL” on the sidewalk in front of the house owned by the naive mother of the child molester.
Brad wants to be a boy. Kathy doesn’t want to be a wife. Sarah doesn’t want to be a mother. Her spouse, Richard, doesn’t want to be a husband, and Larry doesn’t want to be a father. And yet here they all are, in a nice, leafy suburb, making a big mess.
The acting is impeccable, especially the indelibly creepy and strangely touching performance by onetime child star Jackie Earle Haley as Ronnie the child molester. Like Ronnie, Little Children is impossible to like but impossible to shake.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
