By ERIKA JORDAN ’11
Contributing Writer
Looking for a great movie to watch? Like fairytales?
Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson star in “Little Children” (Todd Field 2006), a story that has it all: romance, intrigue and tragedy, compacted into an alluring world of narrative cohesion.
The 2006 film stars Kate Winslet as Sarah, a former college feminist shocked to find herself knee-deep in marriage and motherhood, straining to hold on to remnants of her former self in a mundane and unexciting world. She meets Brad, another desolate soul lost in suburbia (played by Lakeview Terrace’s Patrick Wilson), and romance ensues as the two attempt to live out their childish fantasies. Meanwhile, a registered sex offender, played by Jackie Earle Haley of The Bad News Bears, moves into the neighborhood and disturbs its all-too-comfortable façade of morality. The three storylines intersect throughout, enacting the film’s fixation with narrative completeness, while painfully reminding the viewer of the ways in which reality constantly disregards fantasy.
Will Lyman of PBS’s “Frontline” narrates the film, navigating the entire plot with restrained wit and irony, maintaining its dark implications of “little children” in suburbia. Little Children materializes tensions between reality and fantasy with its stimulating distractions — the viewer is invited to submit to illusion along with the Sarah and Brad, but reality is rather tragically persistent, even within a story that deceivingly offers simplicity.
Little Children is more than a moral fable about children or sex or suburbia—it is a highly sensual and superbly-acted examination of ambiguities between love and sex, “little” and “big” children, fantasy and real life.