Little Children (DVD)

There's something about this film I love. I think it captures both the angst and beauty of raising young children in suburban America and the difficulty that task brings to bare upon the care-giving adult ego. On the other hand, the film also shows the viciousness adults can act out upon each other in order to either feel accepted by society, or to fulfill personal and compulsive urges without concern for the end result and the damage to loved ones scarred by these actions and deceptions.When I watch the film, I have tremendous empathy for all the characters both major and minor, sinner and saint. I'm somehow touched by their sins and machinations to try and feel alive, appreciated and even vital. I think this is rare in a film. The third person narrator periodically making an appearance is genius because it creates separation between the characters and the audience allowing the viewer to feel god-like: removed & omniscient and removed, but still lovingly attached. Hence the empathy.The movie is based upon an excellent novel, but somehow Kate Winslet transports her character on screen, to feel deeper than the one in the book. That's rare.

Anything with Kate Winslet is worth watching. Good story line, suspenseful with a nice unexpected ending.

"Little Children" is not likely a movie I'm going to watch again and again, but I am glad to have watched it at least once because of the pleasure I derive from watching Kate Winslet play another interesting character. Sometimes, I think her charisma, sex appeal, and force of character are so great, it wouldn't be boring listening to her recite a list of fertilizer ingredients...but then I snap back to reality.<spoilers>"Little Children" doesn't have that much of a plot. A bored housewife named Sarah (played by Winslet) with a loser husband "meets cute" with Brad (Todd in the book), a handsome but passive "househusband" who has a beautiful but cold wife. At first, you almost believe that the two characters can pull off what Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally" said was impossible ... a platonic, close friendship, but then there's that moment in the laundry room in Sarah's home that gives the movie a well-deserved R-rating (and several other moments as well).One lesson people can take away from watching this movie is that sometimes, "good" people can drift into adultery without really meaning to and that it's easy to be caught up in the excitement of the affair, but usually, there's a moment where the lovers return to Earth.High points for the movie include just about any scene Winslet's character is in and the chemistry she has with the actor playing Brad. That chemistry is present any time they are together and not just when they are having sex.This being said...the movie is not for everyone's taste. The subplot of the neighborhood being rightly disturbed about the return of a sex offender to the neighborhood has several very unpleasant scenes in it.Also, it's a bit of reach when the narrator refers to Winslet as being "not that attractive." Despite what People Magazine may say in silly articles titled "the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World," Winslet is not some ravishing beauty like Angelina Jolie. Frankly, I think she is pretty (both as an actress and as the character in this movie) but in a natural and wholesome way. Given the fact that she once again delivers what I think is a faultless American accent, she comes across as an "all-American girl" who looks wonderful in the red swimsuit she purchases on a lark.There are two points in the story where I found myself wondering "What would happen or people think if the characters in question did this in real life?" The first concerns Brad's habit of staring at some teenagers skateboarding each night while he mourns his lost youth. In real life in a town on edge about a sex offender being in its midst, I have a feeling people would find him doing that rather creepy. The second concerns the ex-cop who discovers that the sex offender has castrated himself and rushes him to a hospital. Given the fact that the ex-cop had been steadily harassing and threatening this man and this was publicly known, I found myself wondering if the first reaction of the authorities might have been to suspect that the ex-cop had done the damage and not the pervert himself.Another flaw to the storyline is that the plot ends abruptly and we're left wondering what happened to the characters after the main drama ended. The book does provide more details<differences between the book and the movie>The book has more detail on both the main characters. In it, Sarah is depicted as being a rather plain looking woman (which makes me think that if they had wanted to be absolutely faithful to the book, someone like Meryl Streep if she had been young enough would have been better for the role...but I didn't find Winslet playing Sarah improbable). We get more details about what a loser Sarah's porn-addicted husband is, and I found myself not very interested in reading about how he went on a pilgrimage to California to meet up with the very strange "Slutty Kay" who became the object of his obsessions. The ex-cop who persecutes the pedophile in the story is also given more dimension as is Mary Ann who is Sarah's antagonist.The ending is different as well. In the movie, the clear suggestion is that both Sarah and Brad decided that running off together was not a good idea. The movie also showed Brad's wife having strong suspicions of an affair but not certain knowledge (and we see her rushing to her husband's side after he is injured trying a stunt with a skateboard).In the book, Brad decides after his accident that running off with Sarah would have been a mistake. Sarah, however, is heartbroken when she realizes that Brad doesn't want to divorce his wife and marry her.Still another important difference is that the pedophile in the book confesses (or at least appears to confess) to a murder of a little girl who was going "to tell on him." This was not in the film. Unlike in the film, he does not castrate himself in an effort to "be a good boy" as his mother asked him to be from her death bed.<Speculation about What Might Have Happened after the Rather Abrupt Ending>Despite the fact that Brad and Sarah were "misbehaving" I have to confess I rather liked them as characters and a couple, and I found myself wondering what would have happened (or what I would have liked to have happened after the story ended).Frankly, I think that Brad might have found out that his marriage was over despite his apparent belief that he could return to his wife after his summer fling had ended. Besides cheating on her, he also had lied to her a great deal about his desire to become a lawyer, culminating in him going off for a weekend with Sarah when he was supposed to have been taking the bar exam. I think it would be much easier to forgive someone who strayed once (a one night stand on a business trip) than forgive someone who engaged in a significant affair and lied a fair amount about it and other things.As for Sarah, I figure that she might have had her heart temporarily broken by Brad's no-show in the playground, but she'd get over it and get used to being a single mom and hopefully meet some nice guy who was single.But I suppose the ending after the ending I would have liked to have seen would have been her and Brad finally getting together once the dust had settled from the wreckage of both their marriages.***Both the book and movie are well done and thought provoking and worth reading and watching. The DVD comes with no extras or commentary because apparently the people behind it "wanted it that way"...which is pretty inexplicable since the movie was a critical success and hardly something that you'd want to blot out of existence.

Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson give very strong performances in this candid look at suburban discontent. Strong direction gives this fine American Film a "you are there" feeling. A superb original score byThomas Newman adds to the tone of this exceptional look at what it means to be "adult."

Yippeee... I wanted to watch this film after reading positive reviews galore, in addition to the "controversial subject matter". What is seen is a barrage of clichés disguised by a different eggshell. Dissatisfied middle-class suburbanites looking for a way out of their self-imposed cage. The only ways out are to regress to primitive instincts, as wanting to be a skateboard-riding teenager or simply reinventing primordial lust. Now, the reasoning behind it I guess is still formulaic. Fetishism on the one hand (collecting odd items from some internet diva) and the hardened domineering wife-boss figure, symbolically castrating the jobless man of the house, "reduced" to a social mockery of the stay-at-home parent. The anti-hero, Mr Exhibitionist, is perhaps the one who needs to be focused on as the most human of all. Touted as a pedophile in the subtext (even though this is insanely untrue), he displays the utmost need to be seen in his ordinarily repressed sexuality.. this is why exhibitionists do what they do, they need their sexual organs to be noticed, and their is unbearable anxiety and distress if their impulses are not obeyed. The regression also extends to his oedipal ties with mommy. Now, everybody goes through conflict, and all is magically resolved. The killing of 2 birds with one stone comes with the washed-up ex-cop who killed a kid... in matters of pure instinctual survival drive, he manages to display reaction formation (loathing of the sexual offender when, deep down inside, perhaps he identified with him or had the wish to save him) as well as a fairy-tale chance to save the child-figure he murdered in the past (hence "atoning" his past errors), after the man cuts his own penis off, in a fantastic demonstration of a partial object coming to life and dying by a symbolic (and literal) detachment from the conflicted psyche. Of note, it is of a more pedophilic nature to lust after the childhood universe (even if it's in a veiled and nonsexual way), as the skateboarding scenario would suggest... it's called romantic pedophilia, and may certainly convert to a sexual kind... but these hypotheses are useless.. after all, all conflict needn't be faced head-on to simply disappear. But, of course, as American culture has time and again jammed down everyone's throat, nobody needs to have any deep realization about the root of their problems nor gain even the slightest insight, it's all a matter of some intangible force tapping them on their limbic system, and the self-contained story comes to a close with the happy ending preceding the closing credits, allowing us to believe nothing negative will derive from subsequent events.