Little Children is a two-and-a-half hour train wreck. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because, as is the case with most wreckage, you can’t look away.
The characters in this first-rate film are all in different states of disrepair stemming from the quiet desperation of American suburbia.
Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is the perennial desperate housewife. She is confounded by a daughter she doesn’t understand and ignored by a husband who has stopped trying to understand her. Her daily routine includes a long stay at the neighborhood playground, where she is surrounded by soccer moms who prepare afternoon snacks for their tots like they are prepping for open-heart surgery.
The only refuge Sarah has is her library, which she sees as an oasis of quiet understanding amidst a world that doesn’t condone her discontent.
When the similarly dissatisfied stay-at-home dad Brad (Broadway native Patrick Wilson) appears with his little tyke at the playground, Sarah is instantly drawn to him. The rest of the moms are mesmerized by his handsome physique, but Sarah is attracted to his individuality. He is unassuming and shows no shame in being the only male among a gaggle of soccer moms. He is different, which is what Sarah craves: something extraordinary.
Brad is similarly enthralled by Sarah’s easygoing, intellectual persona and her laidback approach to childcare. His wife (Jennifer Connelly) may be a beautiful breadwinner who urges him to try the Bar exam one more time, but Sarah doesn’t require anything of Brad and he finds it electrifying. What starts as a plutonic friendship erupts into an inevitable, passionate affair.
An unnerving subplot involving a chilly, childlike pedophile (an Oscar-nominated performance from Jackie Earle Haley) and his long-suffering, ever-loving mother (Phyllis Somerville) adds a sense of urgency to the film. The omnipresent locomotive in the distance hints that these two worlds are destined to collide, with grim results.
Little Children’s trajectory is familiar enough. It is reminiscent of American Beauty, the iconic homage to suburban dystopia, and it even has the dark humor and sinister subplots of a feature-length Desperate Housewives episode. This combination is explosive, producing a fine film that has a date with disaster from the opening credits.
The film begins, quite unexpectedly, with a jarring voiceover from a narrator who is a little too coy and offers an odd omnipotent perspective of the characters’ inner thoughts. While I was initially annoyed by this clich? ploy, I recognized its value as the film wore on.
From the very beginning, the voiceover reminds us that we are visitors in a parallel universe. The narration cements our position as observers, strapping us in for a ride through the world these people inhabit.
Winslet proves once again why she is one of the most reliable actresses working today, with a performance that aches with a hopeless longing and a “hunger,” as her character says, “for an alternative” to her lonely existence. The role won the 31-year-old Winslet her fifth Oscar nomination, an award she seems destined to lose to another Brit who has royalty on her side (Dame Helen Mirren). Whether she wins the award or not, this film would fall to pieces without Winslet’s focused performance.
The chemistry between Winslet and Wilson serves as the third lead role in this film. Their sizzling sexual tension drives this locomotive of a film forward with reckless abandon toward its looming climax that is ushered in by the sound of an oncoming train. As the title suggests, the two act like children, coming together in spite of, or because of, the fact that it is considered wrong. They are struggling to maintain their own dynamic identities and use each other as a means to that collective end.
Sounds of ominous locomotives dominate the soundtrack throughout the film and this is surely an obvious nod to the drone of everyday existence, among other things. The characters act as though they are tied down to the rails, trapped in a life that is slowly suffocating them.
The train’s sound, reminiscent of a tornado’s, hints at impending doom, heightening the viewer’s awareness at pivotal points in the story. The question is, when the dust settles, will these characters’ lives look the same, as if a train passed through, kicking up rubble but leaving its surroundings untouched, or will their world be burdened by the wreckage of a violent cyclone?
As it turns out, the result might be a little bit of both. This film is too savvy to offer simple answers to complex questions of identity, attraction and autonomy. What Little Children does offer is a view of people in varying states of crisis and the decisions they make during the storms that shape their futures.
