Friday November 17, 2006 SGN.org |
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Volume 34 Issue 46 |
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Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
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Little Children: American Beauty meets 'Desperate Housewives' sums up this well-made movie soap opera |
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| Little Children: American Beauty meets 'Desperate Housewives' sums up this well-made movie soap opera | ||
| Opening Friday at the Seven Gables Todd Fields' Little Children is a sort of American Beauty meets "Desperate Housewives," with an added dash of child molestation paranoia, as told from a "Gen-X with Yuppie leanings" perspective. "Beautiful Desperate American Housewives?" If that summary seems in itself a put-on, think of the satirical possibilities of this film, in quality Indie hands (42-year-old director/writer Fields, from Portland, made a semi-spectacular debut with In The Bedroom five years ago. His co-writer Tom Perrotta, on whose book this film is based, wrote Election; and the cast is first-rate, with Kate Winslet adding box-office clout). Children could have been a Gone With The Wind of small-town WASP-ish quiet desperation. All of the elements are here for a moving, profound even, morality tale. Yet, curiously, while Children gathers steam throughout, it finally falls flat in a puff of its own stale wind. Winslet plays an archetypically antsy, unfulfilled, bored spouse, nicely ensconced in spacious New England commuter town digs by a nerdy, vacuous biz-whiz husband whose real sex life centers on Internet porn. Daily she takes their kid to a town park to commiserate with other wives of her ilk, where one day, on a dare to herself, she mischievously kisses a mysterious, handsome young daddy (played by Patrick Wilson, a 33-year-old stage actor uncannily resembling a young Paul Newman) who has been the center of the wives' fantasy lives. A half-assed dalliance ensues, barely beyond the hand-shaking stage (he seems a bit dense in the seduction department), until she finally pushes it over the top into an outright affair. (Since you asked, yes, we see both of them naked, or almost entirely so - a lot). Plenty of dark shadows looming on the moral horizon here, none of which is more ominous than the town sex offender, a registered kiddie-stalker, whose presence in the town is monitored by a fanatical vigilante posse self-appointed to harass the man and his beleaguered mother (played by the great Phyllis Somerville, she's the film's one sympathetically memorable character). While he's reviled as a monster of Leatherface proportions (if Jackie Earle Haley's pockmarked face seems vaguely familiar to you, think back to his child-star role in The Bad News Bears), his great crime, for which he spent two years in the slammer, was flashing a few kiddies. Returning to a world which is anything but forgiving he is all but lynched by law-enforcement thugs who are portrayed as far more dangerous than the poor creep they'd love to castrate. Here, and elsewhere, Children leapfrogs so far over the top of mere satire that it lands, ker-plop, in the realm of Farce. Our handsome adulterers, easily escaping notice of their (otherwise occupied in their own obsessions) spouses, plot to run away together to some sort of fool's paradise, with or without their kids isn't quite clear. Never mind that neither of them seem capable of making a living on their own (she's an overeducated bimbo with no apparent marketable skills and he's a wannabe lawyer who can't pass and, finally, doesn't even bother to re-take, the bar exam). It all cartwheels to an improbable, off-key, perhaps intentionally surrealistic climax, little of which makes logical sense but, then, maybe it's not supposed to. The wonderful Jennifer Connelly (House Of Sand And Fog) is somewhat wasted in her minor role as the hunk's careerist wife (she makes socially-relevant documentary films but of course hasn't a clue about her own marriage, etc.). She typifies this film as a whole: abounding in potential greatness but failing to rise above the level of a well-made soap opera. |
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