TRH Movie – Little Children

It’s no secret that I love going to the movies, the popcorn, the big screen, the big, comfy chairs. What I hate about going to the movies? Everyone else at the theatre. If there’s one thing I truly despise, it’s when the other people in the theatre ruin the movie-going experience for me. The jerks. If it wasn’t the woman who arrived three minutes to screen time looking for 4 seats together, it was the knuckleheads beside me who talked through the entire movie.

“There’s Kate Winslet!”

Yes, and there are her nipples. I don’t need a running commentary of what they look like, I can also see them on the screen there, 40 feet tall and pointing directly at me. Oh, and if you’re going to wear a giant parka, please take it off before the movie starts, not during, and then please don’t lie it across me so that I’m wearing it as a blanket. And then, if you could be so kind, please don’t HIT ME THROUGH THE WHOLE MOVIE as you eat your popcorn. Seriously, my left arm is black and blue.

So. Annoying.

Annnywaaay. Tara and I went to go see Little Children on Saturday evening. Todd Field’s second movie, the follow-up to In the Bedroom, Little Children deals with some of the same themes, characters with fatal flaws, families in crisis to an extent, illicit relationships with violent consequences, etc. It’s also loooong, like In the Bedroom, which I wouldn’t have minded if the movie going experience didn’t make me want to lose my mind.

Kate Winslet plays Sarah Pierce, an unsatisfied housewife with a toddler who isn’t necessarily convinced she should be a mother. She and house-husband, failed lawyer, ex-football star Brad Adamson (the truly hunky Patrick Wilson) begin an affair that for better or worse, brings them to conclusions about their own lives that will change them forever. The second interweaving storyline involves a pedophile, Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), an ex-cop Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), and the furor over the convicted sex offender returning to the quiet Massachusetts town to live with his mother.

The characters interact, but on a very small basis, they slip in and out of each other’s lives, more to keep them glued together and relevant than any other reason. I guess the film is more of an exploration of human nature when it’s pushed into extreme situations, what happens when happiness is tied to deceit and turns into unhappiness, the state of modern marriage, society’s obvious and necessary fear of sexual predators, and so on.

I’m batting two for two in terms of seeing films in the theatre that I both like and respect, first The Departed, and now this one. If I have one criticism of Field’s directing, it’s that he’s always looking for that one cool shot, you know, the shadow in the picture frame-type stuff that is more to prove to the audience that he’s cool than anything else. He could have shot the film clean, with none of the fancy-dancy camera moves that pulled me out rather than kept me in the picture, but on the whole, that’s a small criticism of an extremely well acted, well scripted and well directed movie.