I’ve seen quite a few good, thought provoking movies lately dealing with families: "Children of Men", "Sherrybaby" and, tonight, "Little Children" which I’ve wanted to see for a while if only for Kate Winslet who’s a terrific actress capable of playing anyone from period costume dramas to contemporary urbane movies. She's scored her fifth Oscar nomination for her work in "Little Children." Todd Field, who previously directed "In The Bedroom," once again returns to New England, this time showing the domestic drama unfolding in leafy, suburban Massachusetts. If water, rippling and running, and doors creaking were the aural hallmarks of "In The Bedroom," the soundscape of "Little Children" feature the rustling of summer leaves, in the wind or against the shingles of the homes where various family dramas unfold. One prominent disturbance takes the form of Ronnie McGorvey, a child sex offender who’s moved in to the neighbourhood where Sarah Pierce, Kate Winslet’s character, has started an affair with Brad Adamson, played by Patrick Wilson.
Todd Field is a quiet and unassuming director capable of devastatingly disturbing the superficial peace of middle and upper middle class America in pictures as much as through words. In "In The Bedroom," a representative shot is of the young Brown architecture student Frank Fowler, played by Nick Stahl, running in a green summer meadow with the older, divorced working class single mother he's begun dating, played by Marisa Tomei. Tanned feet and white legs in motion, the sounds of breathless giggling stand in stark contrast to the aural and visual order of the Eastern European choir, directed by Frank's mother, played by Sissy Spacek. ("In The Bedroom" is noteworthy, too, for showing that Marisa Tomei can indeed act and somewhat quieting the uproar she caused when she won the Best Support Actress Oscar for her turn as Mona Lisa Vito in "My Cousin Vinny" some years earlier.) There are two such scenes in "Little Children." One is when Ronnie McGorvey, in conspicuous snorkel gear, dives into the public swimming pool and causes a panic of JAWS-like proportion. The other is of a post-coital Sarah and Brad not in the bedroom, as it were, but in the attic, the room of choice for their afternoon affairs. Sarah’s silky, porcelain thighs and legs, her foot on top of Brad’s tanned, taut chest glistening with sweat, his golden skin against the weathered floorboards, muddy and green, is as eloquent picture of decay and desire as I’ve seen in a very long time. She’s asking him what his wife looks like and if she’s a knockout. Unrelenting in her questioning, he responds affirmatively but adds that “Beauty is overrated.” The movie is worth seeing just for the delicate visual beauty of these shots. Todd Field has a simultaneously firm and supple grasp on visual vocabulary.
The movie’s provocative in many other ways. The fear of the child molester moving in to the neighbourhood is the talk of the town, from the playground to the dinner table. The movie hits a topical, cultural nerve especially when you think about the abundance of warnings to parents about child predators from “Amber alerts”, the public notices about child abductions, to the popularity of NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series, that the ultimate cultural gatekeeper, Oprah Winfrey, has featured on her show and professed she loves to watch. Physical and sexual crimes against children are serious and offenders should be punished with equal and appropriate seriousness. A way that’s happened, in the real world as in the movie, is through laws that publicize a sex offender’s release from prison and his or her criminal offense when relocating back into a particular community. Community members do have a right to know who’s living near them. What’s troubling is the kind of handwashing and vigilante justice that occurs as a result. We don't want them to live near us but, they have to live somewhere and somewhere is always someone else's neighbourhood. Parents are rightly concerned about sex offenders but, in attempting to protect their children, they turn to some un-neighbourly, and downright criminal, means. McGorvey, and his mother in whose home he’s returned, are verbally and physically harassed. McGorvey’s life is threatened.
The movie, however, doesn't absolve McGorvey, played chillingly and eerily by Jackie Earl Haley, who, until this role for which he's been nominated for an Oscar, was best known for being one of the "The Bad News Bears." Todd Field, who co-wrote the script with Ted Perrota, who wrote the original novel upon which the movie is based, writes a very complicated Ronnie McGorvey whom the audience can both find sympathetic and wholly abhorrent. Shamed and threatened with violence and death from his neighbours, he defends his mother and her home and she, in turns, defends her son. The movie becomes very emotionally and ideologically complicated when it examines the twisted web of relations between parents and children. Afraid of what will happen to her son when she dies (“I’m an old woman, I’m not gonna live forever you know. Who’s gonna wash the dishes?”), she buys a personal ad to find him a girlfriend, a wife. After sharing dessert with his date, and offering us a glimpse of his capacity for understanding and tenderness, Ronnie utterly violates this woman’s trust, and ours. Focusing in on the woman’s shock at McGorvey’s abuse, the camera gives us a glimpse of the top of a slide, a swing. This is all happening next to a playground. Whatever sympathy we may have had for this man is absolutely shattered made even worse because of our complicity in creating Ronnie McGorvey. It becomes evident that Ronnie has serious problems and the crimes attributed to him isn't a judicial mistake or paranoia based on some of the Committee for Concerned Parents more vocal and hands-on, for lack of a better word, watchdogs who paper East Wyndham with posters of Ronnie's face and vandalize his mother's home. "Society" is cited as creating outcasts and monsters and we're rightly complicit in creating Ronnie, if not him as an individual offender then the pathology. We may not all sexually molest children, indeed, most of us don't. But most of us do abuse children in other ways. We yell at them, we ignore them. Pay particular attention to Sarah, fresh from showering after an overnight trip with Brad ("This is our first real date! Without the kids."), admiring her dewy face and rosy complexion in the mirror, shooing away her daughter on the other side of the bathroom door who wants to give her a gift she's made. Children are interruptions. Even worse than the neglect of burdensome children to satisfy and indulge narcissistic needs is the way children are treated as objects and pawns to satisfy our own needs including the most basic need to love and be loved. Sarah and Brad meet because of their children and their affair escalates through the cover of playdates for the kids.
A child molester is in our presence. But there are different kinds of abuses that can take place. And what "To Catch a Predator" doesn't tell us is the vast majority, something like 90%, of crimes against children are committed by people related or known to the child. Famiies can be abusive places. McGorvey, as a man-child-monster (a late 40-something year old man, he’s still referred to with the boyish “Ronnie”, not “Ron” or “Ronald”), is the product of a loving home, probably much like the other homes in this leafy town, including Sarah and Brad’s. And the parents, the protectors in this film are not the heroes we, or their children (don’t forget the children) need them to be, to act as foil and saviour for the abomination in our midst. There’s Sarah, a dissatisfied housewife, with a husband addicted to internet porn. She failed to get her PhD (“I only have an MA; I didn’t write my thesis”) who spends hours underlining passages in sonnets and writing in her journal and defending Madame Bovary. She’s not a slut, she argues before the other ladies in her book club, she’s just a woman struggling, a woman who still has hunger. She could be talking about herself. In fact she is. If Sarah is admirable if only for her self-knowledge, then Brad is the complete opposite: an ignorant, lazy goof. A really good-looking one but a goof nonetheless. Tall and muscular and goldenly sun-kissed, the playground housewives nickname him “the prom king” and there’s indeed a mismatch between who he is and what he wants to be. A stay at home dad whose wife is a documentary film-maker, he has a law degree but has failed the bar twice. Instead of studying for one last shot at the bar exam, he whittles away hours watching teenage boys skateboard, wishing he was one of them and joins a football league to relive his glory days. His wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, with her own dreams of respectability, desperately wants for him to be a lawyer and, in the meantime, won’t get him a cell phone of his own and leaves him little notes on their credit card statements about his spending. It would be too easy to blame Brad’s wife and say he’s emasculated but Brad has no semblance of discipline even to enact his own desire. He's distracted by everything.
Ronnie, Sarah and Brad all display different sides of desire. McGorvey’s is twisted and has turned upon itself. Urged to “be a good boy”, that’s ultimately what he wants: little boys and little girls. Sarah and Brad do no better. Unable to deal with the reality of their adult lives all they want is to be children, not even good ones, but just children with no responsibility and nothing but leafy, warm summer days ahead of them, spent on the playground or the pool. But these are complicated characters- Field and Perrota have written a good script- and they’re neither just adults or just children. They’re both. As much as each has a burning desire for something they can’t or shouldn’t have, they also have the capacity for choice. They all make choices in the end that are, to varying degrees, sacrifices, at once shocking, satisfying and necessary to become something other than they are because, sooner or later, everyone’s gotta grow up.
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