LITTLE CHILDREN
(three stars)
It ain’t “According to Jim.”
Running time: 132 minutes. Rated R (nudity, sex, profanity, violence). At the Lincoln Square and the Angelika.
‘LITTLE Children” is a little miraculous in the way it makes the suburbs all the things they (seemingly) aren’t: dark, mys terious, interesting. But the movie is easier to admire than to love, and it sometimes confuses stately with sluggish.
Brad (Patrick Wilson), the father of a toddler, is a law-school graduate who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam, but he’s failed twice and knows he’ll never be a lawyer. When he confesses this to Sarah (Kate Winsslet), a frustrated young mom he meets at the playground, she is struck by his honesty as well as by his looks: “Prom King” is his nickname to the coven of local hausfraus who lurk on the benches like the Simon Cowells of parenting. One of the smug mombots supplies Sarah’s hungry little girl with a snack because “I hate to see her suffer.”
Sarah and Brad stage a kiss to freak them out, but the impulse behind it is real. It’s also dangerous considering Brad has a control-freak wife of his own (Jennifer Connelly). Meanwhile Brad joins a violent amateur football league of soft-bellied men at the urging of a manic friend (Noah Emmerich) whose hobby is to drive by the home of the local sex offender six times a day to scream warnings.
The surprise is that the pervert – unnervingly played by Jackie Earle Haley, the child star of “The Bad News Bears” who is making a major comeback after years spent delivering pizzas and such – is a person, too. He’s guilty only of exposing himself in public, and he’s unemployed, friendless and living with his mother. Possibly he’s a decent guy who made one mistake, but on the other hand maybe his first crime was just practice.
Tom Perrotta’s novel was a serious comedy whose piercing observations elevated it above sitcomland. The movie steers even farther away. Though set in Massachusetts (and shot on Staten Island), it’s styled like a European art film with few laughs.
Director Todd Field, who made the slow, somber “In the Bedroom” and acted in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” shows Kubrick’s influence in this movie’s fluid, elegant camera work and cello-toned seriousness. It’s set in summer, but it has a Novembery chill, and it doesn’t offer you a blanket.
Every character except the kids is severely flawed, but so deep are the roots Perrotta has created that you wish everyone well – even the sex offender. A deadpan omniscient narrator adds to the novelistic texture, peeking into each character’s point of view.
Like Kubrick, Field won’t be rushed. In the second hour, just when things should be picking up, Field hits the brakes. There’s a superfluous scene in which Sarah and her book group discuss “Madame Bovary,” and Field lingers with the secondary characters – especially the one played by Emmerich, who is not in the same league as the rest of the cast – when we want to get back to the main story.
Field may not be disciplined – he should have trimmed 10 minutes or so, which was also true of the 138-minute “In the Bedroom.” After all the sketchily scripted movies I’ve seen this year, it’s petulant of me to complain that the characters are too finely drawn. A movie has to make its points economically as well as skillfully, though.
“Little Children” will rightly be praised for finding in the suburbs much more than a few Applebee’s jokes or “Desperate Housewives” camp. And its artistry is impressive. The frequently heard moan of trains in the distance is like a Greek chorus warning us that something terrible is coming, and it’s making all local stops.