:
Kate Winslet,
Kate Winslet,
Jennifer Connelly,
more...
:
Todd Field,
Todd Field
see all cast/crew...
: 
: New Line Home Video
: Drama, Romance
: 137 min.
see additional details...
|
|
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Todd Field teams with novelist Tom Perrotta to adapt Perrotta's acclaimed novel concerning the suburban malaise experienced by a handful of small-town individuals whose intersecting lives converge in a variety of surprising, and sometimes ominous, ways. Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, and Patrick Wilson star in a cinematic adaptation that doesn't aim so much to simply reproduce the book for the screen as it does to re-imagine the written word by exploring new possibilities for the characters and situations originally presented in Perrotta's 2004 best-seller. Sarah (Winslet) is a suburban outsider who, unlike the other playground moms, isn't afraid to approach the dreamy but long-absent father whom smitten housewives have taken to calling the "Prom King." Long days at the local community pool with their respective children soon find Sarah becoming acquainted with local husband and father Brad (Patrick Wilson) -- who seems to share in her seething discontentment with life in their quaint commuter town. An English literature major who never envisioned a fate as a soccer mom, Sarah has a growing dissatisfaction with her successful husband (Gregg Edelman) that parallels Brad's increasing frustration with his inability to pass the bar and connect with his wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a successful documentary filmmaker. It's not long before the dejected pair is meeting for a series of illicit afternoon trysts as their unsuspecting spouses work and their children lie quietly napping. Meanwhile, after the community is riled by the return of a convicted sex offender (Jackie Earle Haley) who leaves the concerned parents scrambling to protect their young ones, an attempt made by Sarah and Brad to legitimize their clandestine relationship by dining together with their respective spouses begins to awaken Kathy's suspicions about the fidelity of her husband. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
|
| Phony Baloney
by talltale
May 2, 2007 - 9:37 AM PDT
|
|
|
4 out of 7 members found this review helpful
|
Wild horses could not have dragged me from my determination to see LITTLE CHILDREN, even after several friends warned me away ("One of the stupidest movies I've ever seen!" etc). Such provenance it seemed to offer: Todd Field, Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson--plus The NY Times' Janet Maslin loved the book by Tom Perrotta, while one of my favorite reviewers, the Times' A.O. Scott, raved about the Field/Perrotta movie collaboration. I was, as they say, primed.
Moral: listen to your friends or submit to those wild horses. "Little Children" is a disaster so complete that, if you've not zoned out by the time of the laughable finale, you will be shocked at how talented people could offer up such a noxious blend of stupidity, ugliness and sentimentality, in which, from the first "kiss," nothing is real or believable as the story proceeds slowly downhill. Field's style, amazingly, seems to combine the reticent with the ham-fisted (due probably to good acting at the service of a script that appears to have been written from end to beginning so that everything seems preconceived and phony).
From the marriages to the affair, the bar exam, the skateboarding, and the reactions of everyone from the women's "chorus," to the kids and Larry Hedges (surely--despite actor Noah Emmerich's game attempt--the phoniest character to come down the pike in many moons), this movie keeps quietly shrieking "Nutty!" so persistently that it simply wears you down. I have heard "Little Children" called a comedy. You may chuckle at the the lameness on display, but even black comedies have more laughter than this. As for drama or, god help us, tragedy, a little reality now and then would have been a huge help.
I should say a word about the single scene that really works: a date between the "flasher" and a neurotic young woman--played by the always brilliant Jane Adams. Ms Adams literally lifts the movie into reality for a brief time. Her humanity, empathy, honesty and spirit are so complete that we find oursevles rapt and wrapped in the cocoon-like place that a great performance can take us. Until the filmmakers bring us back to their own fake reality with another nitwit scene that boggles both the mind and the imagination.
|
|
|
GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.14)
50 Votes
add to list 
|
|
|
Your cart
MDallum
© 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. Portions of content provided by All Movie Guide®,
a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.