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Little Children February 13, 2007 |
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Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson star for the great young director Todd Field as summertime lovers in “Little Children”, a film virtually indefinable by simple terms, for just when you think you have it pegged as a romance, or as a disturbingly ironic study in suburban human relationships, it throws you for a loop with bursts of dark humor that renders it part comedy, part tragedy, and part knowingly difficult human satire. With a detached voice over straight from co-writer Tom Perrotta’s novel, the film looks at a group of middle class suburban citizens as if they were rats in a maze, looking to find their way around their daily boredom and innocuous existence with new friendships and experimentation, all the while treating the outsider, a recently released sex offender (Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley) like the plague, disruptive to their everyday sense of security, but still legally a functioning participant in society. What Field does as a director is to scrutinize the decisions the characters make with scenes that are both darkly comical and disturbingly off-putting (like Haley’s first date post-jail, or Winslet and Wilson’s first kiss, on a play-date with their children as jealous housewives watch in horror from a side bench), while leaving the most critical judgment up to the audience as to which of these lost souls deserves redemption, and a second guessing of their suspect choices. by Adam Suraf |