Little Children (2006)

VERDICT:
4/10 Baby Daddies

Like watching two movies at the same time and only one of them is good.

Little Children is about a suburban wife with a failing marriage and a child she can’t relate to, a suburban husband who’s a child at heart and can’t live up the adult responsibilities that’s expected of him by his wife, and a convicted sex offender who moves back into town with his mother after exposing himself to a local kid. Through a strange course of events, the suburban wife and the suburban husband strike up an affair, try to realize through each other the lives they could have had, and the sex offender works (poorly) to settle back into society while getting harassed up the wahzoo by a former cop.

Yeah, there’s too much going on in this movie. Wish I could write up a shorter synopsis, but that’s as brief as it’s gonna get with this one.

Anyway, Little Children is the sophomore effort by writer/director Todd Field, who got his big break back in ’01 with the effing phenomenal movie In the Bedroom. Five years down the road, I don’t know what happened, but this follow-up doesn’t quite measure up.

It starts out strong enough by establishing two interesting and morally immature characters who are looking to break out of the shells they’ve grown into in a very Lester Burnham-like fashion along with one character who’s seriously flawed and shrouded in mystery. I dug it, I wanted to learn more, but the more I learned about these first two hippies, the more unfocused their stories became. By the time everything got resolved at the end, my interest in the lives of these two-timing suburbanites had waned to the point of complete indifference, which was a bummer, but thankfully the same wasn’t true for our friendly neighborhood kiddie flasher. But I’ll get to that in a second…

The real culprit that led to Little Children‘s failure was Field’s decision to the throw an omniscient narrator into the mix.

The problem with the omniscient narrator is that the minute he started talking, all I wanted was for him to shut the hell up. Having someone tell you what every character is feeling and thinking throughout the whole movie rather than just letting their actions do the talking comes off not only as gratingly pointless, but also as a kind of slap in the face to the viewer. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of casting good actors in a movie, so that you don’t need a gimmick to explain to your audience what’s going on every second?

To make matters worse, whenever the O. N. isn’t spelling out every bit of subtlety for you – you know, just in case you missed it, dumbass – the characters themselves tap in and take on the role for him. There’s this one scene where the husband and wife combo are going at it in the attic – which is usually not the best time to strike up a conversation about anything at all – and right in the middle of things, the husband starts going on about, “Do you feel bad? ‘Cause I do. I feel really bad.”

You do? Whoa! Where the hell did that come from? Couldn’t tell that from the guilty look that’s permanently tattooed on your face and the million other subtle tells that cheaters usually give off when they lie to their spouse about banging the chick next door. You, sir, would make a fine poker player.

I don’t know why Field thought this was a good idea, but it is so effing stupid and annoying that it ruins something that could have been much, much better had there just been no God-like presence telling the story to us like he’s reading a book. Doesn’t help either that the resolution for this plotline is totally ridiculous and doesn’t redeem things whatsoever, regardless of the narrator.

Then again, the storyline with the sex offender is great. It plays off like In The Bedroom mixed with The Woodsman and it’s about the one thing about this movie that really works. The narrator is gone, his story is the most compelling of the bunch, and Jackie Earle Haley got robbed of an Oscar for his turn as Ronnie McGorvey. Granted, Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson (dude would make a great serial killer a la Patrick Bateman) are really good in their respective roles, but Haley runs away with this one. So convincingly troubled…how Alan Arkin got the award that year, I will never know.

The thing with Little Children is that if it were just about Haley, it would be great, and if it were just about Winslet and Wilson, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt and thinking it would also be better. But that’s not movie we have and together, it feels confused. Field sure knows how to work a camera, and he obviously knows how to write one hell of a script, but it’s never a good thing when the story that takes up three quarters of your running time is a silly mess.

Not sure what happened, but here’s to hoping he hits it out the park with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.