Bedroom Community

Sarah (Kate Winslet) has an affair with former college football star Brad (Patrick Wilson), the neighbourhood stay-at-home dad. (New Line Productions/Alliance Atlantis

Little Children is a bit like a toddler itself, proudly veering this way and that, delighting in its own lack of direction. Achingly beautiful and swinging between wondrous intelligence and staggering stupidity, it is an infuriating project, which is actually a fair description of both children and parenthood, the film’s other subject. Despite its many virtues, Little Children is blanketed in the quiet superiority that wraps all evil-suburb movies; critics in major cities will likely adore it.

Director Todd Field is a busy man who also acts, scores movies and makes beautiful toothpaste sculptures (well, he probably could), which may explain the five-year delay between his noteworthy debut, In the Bedroom, and Little Children. Like the first, his follow-up is a literary adaptation, this time of the satirical novel by Tom Perrotta, who also wrote the book that became Alexander Payne’s excruciatingly funny Election. Field clearly aspires to a certain high-minded acceptance that literature achieves more easily than film, and the take-me-seriously impulse is in the film’s look, too. Where In the Bedroom’s signature image was an Andrew Wyeth-like tableau of a woman in a field, Little Children offers several careful, wannabe iconic moments: a small girl gazing up at moths fluttering in the street light; the underwater swish of a pedophile’s feet in a crowded pool. Field’s cinematographer Antonio Calvache uses wide frames and a bright, richly hued cleanliness to suggest a sanitized bedroom community where people live, but they don’t really live.

Sarah (Kate Winslet) is the one messy element in this unnamed suburb, hair frizzy and eyebrows a touch unruly (though still bearing a startling resemblance to the movie star Kate Winslet). She is a preoccupied mother of three-year-old Lucy, barely tolerating the daily cavalry of supermoms who don’t so much parent their children as engineer them. In the local park, Sarah is always the mom who forgets the snack, her diaper bag contents spilling across the grass while Lucy revs up to full-blown tantrum. Officious Mary-Ann (Mary B. McCann), with her unyielding block of hair, invites Lucy to share her own tantrum-less child’s snack, tossing Sarah the devastating one liner: “I hate to see her suffer.”

The humiliation and humour of this opening scene is promising. Motherhood, in all its conflicted glory, is great dramatic territory and Sarah is someone we haven’t seen much on film, an accidental mother following the script of her thirties rather listlessly. She is a grad-school dropout married to an older man whose idea of fun is buying used panties over the internet. Their large home is austere — the formal furniture has the tinge of something inherited — except for a room of her own where Sarah keeps volumes of poetry and notebooks, hints of an inner life only indulged during Lucy’s naptime.

Life in the suburbs gets complicated for Sarah (Kate Winslet) and daughter Lucy (Sadie Goldstein) in Little Children. (New Line Productions/Alliance Atlantis)

When former college football star Brad (Patrick Wilson), the neighborhood stay-at-home dad — he is perfectly golden, like the ideal roasted marshmallow — hits the playground with his equally handsome son in tow, the mommy tyrants christen him the Prom King and whisper from afar. In a moment of rebellion, Sarah decides to be the one to approach him, and finds him, well, approachable, an escape hatch with a broad white smile and formidable pecs. Soon, their dull days take a new shape: mornings at the pool, sweat-soaked afternoons of sex in the laundry room while the kids nap.

The hot summer loosens the kind of moral decay that all urban filmmakers snobbishly presume is always churning below the surface in suburbia. Just out of prison, a pedophile named Rodney McGorvey (all hail the return of Breaking Away’s Jackie Earle Haley) returns to the neighbourhood. Larry (Noah Emmerich), a former cop with some time on his hands, turns vigilante, plastering the neighborhood with Concerned Parents Coalition posters (a coalition of one, and sometimes Brad, who drifts alongside without conviction) and showing up on McGorvey’s lawn to heckle him. But his obsession with this pathetic, though believably cruel, little man has more to do with the reason he’s been voluntarily “retired” form the police force than McGorvey’s vague crimes. The cop and the criminal twin the lovers; all together, they make a quartet of ticking time bombs indulging their base instincts for better or worse.

Brad’s wife, Kathy, is a scarily competent documentary filmmaker played by Jennifer Connelly, as physically perfect a specimen as Sarah fears she is. Kathy wants Brad to be the final piece of her well-constructed domestic perfection, and she constantly pressures him to retake his twice-failed bar exam. But Brad would rather watch the local teen skateboarders than study, and in the great push-pull of a bad marriage, she undermines his work as a father: “Did Daddy forget to put sunscreen on you today?” she asks her son as soon as she gets home. The erosion of Brad’s quarterback masculinity, and the silent dinners the family suffers through, speak to a very real, very sad sense that two people in the same house can know nothing of the ways in which they hurt one another; Field nails this relationship. But down the street at Sarah’s, all is broad comedy. Her panty-sniffing husband is a grossly underdeveloped character, marring the symmetry of the infidelity: What is at stake if he is so obviously leave-able?

For every moment we get caught up in the melodrama of the love story — and we do, especially when Sarah eloquently defends her choice via an obvious, but moving, book club meeting about Madame Bovary — there is another where we’re asked to laugh it off. The confusion may lie in the fact that Perrotta and Field are very different artists (though they collaborated on the screenplay). Field, with a nearly desperate need for his characters to find connection no matter how tenuous, does not have an ironic bone in his body; he is no Alexander Payne. He adds a tidy, sympathetic flaw to each of Perrotta’s characters, whereas in his novel, Perotta was ruthless with these people, most of whom are unseemly and unworthy of redemption. Field’s instincts aren’t wrong: the movie would have been unwatchable if it had driven Perrotta’s cynical path the whole way. But when Field’s warm likeability collides with Perrotta’s cool satire, the film stops in its tracks.

A narrator hovers high above the enterprise, intoning verbatim from the novel, telling us everyone’s inner thoughts. The writing is great, but these wry winks are totally unnecessary (and often wrong: the narrator’s description of Sarah calls to mind Ugly Betty, not Kate Winslet). Winslet, in particular, can say just about anything with only the slightest movement of her eyes, and Wilson, in a less interesting part, sweetly conveys the sadness of a jock crippled by nostalgia. The actors work hard to matter, and Emmerich and Haley are both wonderfully vulnerable at times. But the narrator puts the audience at a convenient distance, and consequently, one never really feels the danger in the hottest season; no one, not even the children, seems truly at risk. While dotted with random moments of pure beauty, in the end, Little Children is strangely anticlimactic, and worse, predictable. The hypocrisy nudged forth by good satire arrives with a careful peep, not the roar of unhappiness that these characters deserve to loose upon the suburbs.

Little Children opens in Toronto on Oct. 20, and other Canadian cities on Nov. 3.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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