Quiet and observant, as clean as a neighborhood without sidewalks, “Little Children” works a thoughtful variation on a familiar subject: lust and angst in the suburbs.
The film is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, and it deliberately courts a literary style (even to the point of having a narrator who sounds as though he’s reading a book-on-tape for a soccer mom in her SUV). It examines the effects of two eruptions in a complacent little community.
One eruption is visible, the other secret. The obvious one is that a convicted child molester (Jackie Earle Haley) has returned home to live with his mother. The neighborhood is perturbed about this, especially a weirdly furious neighbor (Noah Emmerich).
We spend more time pondering the secret adultery undertaken by a restless housewife named Sarah (Kate Winslet) and a stay-at-home dad named Brad (Patrick Wilson). Like the measured, untroubled voice of the narrator, the film considers this affair with a detached attitude – perhaps skeptical, certainly bemused.
Sarah and Brad have spouses and children, which means their summerlong meetings at a public pool are charged with a formal, restrained kind of longing. The film takes an admirable amount of time to let this feeling simmer.
Director Todd Field previously made the somber and satisfying “In the Bedroom,” which similarly looked at the chaos beneath a well-maintained lawn. He acted for Stanley Kubrick once (in “Eyes Wide Shut”) and his films have a stately feel reminiscent of Kubrick – although Field’s non-judgmental view of people reads as more sympathetic than Kubrick’s glacial gaze.
The film is even-handed and respectful toward this group of characters, almost to a fault. I couldn’t stay as interested in Emmerich’s character as the others, but the movie devotes a great deal of time to him.
The film is actor-intensive. Patrick Wilson (from the recent “Hard Candy”) is maddeningly unresolved as Brad, and I mean that as a compliment. Jennifer Connelly and Gregg Edelman have less to do as the spouses, but are fine. Jackie Earle Haley, the former “Bad News Bears” kid star (out of movies for years before “All the King’s Men”), is truly weird and unsettling as the pedophile.
But this film rests on a magnificent performance by Kate Winslet. If there were any doubts that Winslet has become one of the treasures of 21st-century movie acting, this film should erase them: Her performance is so full of the tiniest shifts in feeling and thought that you feel as though you can read a world on her face. She’s an intelligent actress who understands intelligent characters can do stupid things.
Which brings us to the title, which is clearly meant to refer not to children, but to adults. Their childishness is on full display, even if the playground is bigger.
Kate Winslet stars in “Little Children.”
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