LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)
dir. Todd Field, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, with Kate Winslett as Sarah, Patrick Wilson as Brad, and Jackie Earle Haley as Ronnie
Startling in its ambition. The claim with Little Children is that castration—both figuratively and literally—is the price to pay for living in the suburbs, for normalcy.
This castration occurs in many different forms throughout Little Children. It’s in the story of Brad’s long emasculation—the overriding arc of the film is, essentially, his one last stint of youthful glory before he settles down and takes the bar exam. It’s in the story of Sarah, frenetically underlying the passages of love poetry that remind her of Brad, pressing flowers into books, and advocating for adultery in her book club meeting. It’s in the thwarted hedonism of Richard, Sarah’s husband, who holds that “if there was one thing life had taught him it was that it was ridiculous to be at war with your own desires,” but whose desires are manifest in an affair with a woman he had “seen only as a digital image” and who is able to act out on them only by masturbating to a pair of panties sent to him in the mail. In the world of the film, everyone is lusting after everyone else, everyone is having affairs at any available opportunity, and the entirety of the actual life of the community exists in fantasy—while the ‘real world’ of jobs and houses and responsibilities is neutered, valueless. And these tensions are most fully realized not with the protagonists—the Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson characters, who are essentially just carrying out a summertime fantasy—but with the marginals, the Noah Emmerich character Larry in desperate need of some sort of redemption, and the pedophile Ronnie who makes literal the physic castration that everybody else is too shy to openly articulate.
I sort of can’t believe that Little Children was actually made. Apparently its own production company couldn’t quite believe it either and effectively buried the movie, losing millions of dollars on it and possibly costing themselves several Oscars. And I certainly can share the queasiness of the New Line executives—there’s the castration scene, the pool scene, and the structuring that makes Ronnie, together with his mother, by far the most sympathetic character. The creepiness of the pool scene is difficult to take in—the pervert as a lost little child like all the other children lining the pool staring at him; and the pervert as some very strange other sort of creature, in his flippers and goggles, diving underwater to escape for a moment from all the stares.
Probably the most vivid moment in Little Children is the date between Ronnie and Sheila. A moment of real apparent empathy—Sheila discussing her breakdown and Ronnie accepting it as it is, treating it as something that makes her interesting as opposed to broken—and then, as soon as Ronnie is alone in the car with Sheila, masturbating furiously and threatening to kill her if she tells on him. With the point being that sex is an untamable desire—that sex makes us not ourselves; and that there is no bridge between a ‘normal,’ ‘healthy’ existence and the tangle of our sexuality.