director: Todd Field
year: 2006
A gaunt pedophile (Jackie Earle Haley) moves into suburbia and disturbs the suburbanites: a collection of stuck-up housewives, and two married couples (Patrick Wilson + Jennifer Connelly & Kate Winlset + Gregg Edelman). When the man from the first marriage, whose wife makes documentaries, begins an affair with the English lit-loving woman from the second, whose husband likes to masturbate to porn while wearing panties he ordered online, Field alternates between moving his story forward and reminding us that his title is a metaphor, for slightly more than two hours. Another metaphor: like the bony pedophile, who exposes himself to children but doesn't actually abuse them, the proceedings aren't at all penetrating.
That Todd Field's Little Children is embarrassingly pretentious perhaps wouldn't be that much of a problem if Field had taken his own material the least bit seriously. After all, there's a risk that anything which aims at profundity can miss and come off as pretension. However, whereas this is a well-intentioned pretension, a failed stab at uncovering a bit of enlightenment, what Field creates in Little Children is anything but well-intentioned; it's malicious. By alternating tones, Field spends much of his film creating a straight narrative with straight themes, only to then mockingly comment on how pathetic and childish his straight characters and their straight problems are. Because he is above making a lurid melodrama (as an artiste who, remember, had a bit part in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut as a pianist whose greatest talent was to play the same note over and over and over again), Field takes a step back and chooses, instead, to make us aware that although he's telling us a lurid story, he's doing it to convey messages that a plain soap opera would never grasp. The problem: Field's messages are even more asinine than what he's deriding! In Little Children, we have a case of a a director who has been outsmarted by his own characters. And, to make the film even more deplorable, Field actually isn't above wallowing in the melodramatic depths afforded his story. Notice, for example, how he milks the "fate" suffered by his pedophile: not only does he take glee in introducing the idea to us through an extreme close-up of a certain object ("oh, golly, what's he going to use that for?") but, even more reprehensibly, he drags out the revelation for about ten minutes, before topping it with what can only be called a twisted money shot. Oh, and don't worry about accidentally missing out on Field's genius. It's impossible; he won't let you.
Todd Field's Little Children are retarded.
