Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Little Children / USA / 2006

Jenny’s review | Beth’s thoughts

You know, after everyone told me how smug, condescending, and hateful this movie is, I actually liked it — and for those reasons. Sure, it takes some easy pot-shots at suburban blahness, but more interesting is that it also targets those characters who think themselves superior to it. Sarah and Brad are people who, like our overbearing Nova-cum-Barry Lyndonesque narrator, feel they possess something special, something that transcends and hovers above the lowly functions of the bourgeoisie and their special little tykes. The point is, as voiced by the mother of a nasty little pervert, that we’re all miracles — which is to say that we’re all special little tykes and so, therefore, none of us is all that special.

With this amount of disdain being cast around, it’s not an easy movie to love. But like the similarly frigid Eyes Wide Shut (which, given Todd Field’s weasly appearance in that film [“heeeey buuuuddy …”], seems to be weighing heavily here), the film likes to needle the cycloptic desiring of its characters to break free from cushy, golden lives that are very much of their own choosing. Is gushy, redemptive humanism (à la American Beauty) a requirement for this type of film? Who wouldn’t want to dispense a little misanthropy in the direction of people who can’t appreciate the summery hum of cicadae, the golden light upon the town pool, the distant clarion call of the evening train, the busy flutter of moths around a droning streetlamp, and being as plain and “boyish” as Kate Winslet?

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: New Line DVD Screener
05 Dec 2006 12:11 PM | Comments (1)

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1. rob / 6 December 2006 / 3:26 AM / URL

   I caught the movie during a trip to New York (I could have seen Inland Empire or The Science of Sleep, but that’s another story), and am caught somewhere in the middle. I liked how the movie regarded the more presumptuous characters with equal amounts of criticism, but far too often the movie seemed convinced of more importance and revelation than it really had. And I absolutely hated the scene where Haley breaks down after his mother’s death; Field’s clinical approach smelt of completely insightless voyeurism. If nothing else, though, one of the best previews of the year.