I tried to summarize the plot of Little Children in an attempt to get my best friend Felicia to go with me: "It's about adultery in suburbia... and... a pedophile comes to town?" I had only the barest grasp of the plot, but it was pretty much correct. As it turned out, though, I found the pedophile part of the story far more interesting, moving and rewarding than the adulterers. Awards season makes you type some damn weird sentences.
For instance, here's a sentence I thought I'd never type: I was totally disappointed in Kate Winslet's performance and even felt a little embarrassed for her in parts.
Yeah, I know. Until this movie, I had thought of Kate Winslet as a sure thing, an actress guaranteed to deliver a performance that utterly illuminated a character and made her a real person. But there were quite a few moments in her portrayal of Sarah, a bored former academic exiled to suburban hell and resentfully raising her daughter, that were positively jarring in their falsehood. And... I'm not at all sure that was deliberate.
For instance, in one scene, Sarah stakes out her lover Brad's house to get a look at his wife. When she sees that the wife is the gorgeous Jennifer Connelly, Sarah starts crying. Winslet blubbers believably for a while, then -- and I still can't quite believe I saw it -- Winslet does a couple of bad-sitcom-quality sobs and in between them she sneaks a peek at the camera. Felicia and I were both positively scandalized by it. "Did you see that?!" While we were confused by how Winslet played that moment, we were utterly flummoxed by director Todd Field's decision to keep it in the film. Was that the only take they had of that scene? Did they mean to replace it in editing but never got around to it?
And while the crying scene was the worst part of Winslet's performance, it was by no means the only bad part. A number of moments in Sarah's scenes with Brad, when she supposedly feels the most alive, the most real, rang painfully false. I wanted to yell, "I can see you acting all the way from the balcony!" at the screen; I could totally see the strings and everything. In light of this performance, I'm just stumped by her nomination for a Golden Globe. Winslet's got a solid body of work, but her work in Little Children is a total misstep.
By comparison, Jackie Earle Haley and Phyllis Sommerville do some incredible work as a recently released sex offender and the mother who loves him unconditionally. As the film progressed, I cared less and less about the self-indulgent, self-obsessed rutting suburbanites and more about this fragile pair. (The voiceover narration is also fantastic.) Overall, I guess I'd recommend Little Children, but -- and damn, this feels weird -- you'll just have to overlook the Winslet.
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