New Review! LITTLE CHILDREN (2006, dir. Todd Field)

Kate Winslet is, hands down, the most important actress working in mainstream American cinema today. She is the only A-list actress willing to play a flawed female character. And I don't mean a flawed female character that involves wearing prosthetics or gaining weight or losing it or playing a man. I mean, an honest to god PERSON. Todd Field's Little Children gives her a great chance to turn in another excellent performance to add to her canon of already impressive characters. Even if the rest of the film falls apart around her, she keeps her integrity as well as her cool.

I L-O-V-E-D In The Bedroom. Loved it. What I love about Todd Field is his timing. He's got a great sense of rhythm. Both these films are punctuated like an English major's thesis and just as flowery in their language. He's almost embarrassingly expressive at times. His shot composition strives to be the stagnant portraits of his idol, Stanley Kubrick, but the subject matter he chooses (suburban hell) doesn't really mesh with this aesthetic as well as he supposes. Where In The Bedroom was haunting, Little Children is practically farcical. The film never transcends its own irony.

Striving to capture an impossible marriage of Todd Solondz and Elia Kazan, Little Children follows the infidelity of two mutually unsatified marrieds, Brad (Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Winslet), as well as the release of a pedophile (Jackie Earle Haley) who is struggling to re-enter the community reformed. Some viewers may be distracted by the topical themes and the operatic execution but, all in all, this film is pretty harmless despite a butt-load of opportunities to be otherwise. The story takes quite of bit of time to get started and then even longer to wrap itself up. The last thirty minutes contained dozens of hasty stabs at meaning only to opt for a pretty convenient ode to redemption. Redemption that, frankly, wasn't earned by anyone. Least of all the director.

If Jennifer Connelly were my wife, I'd probably cheat on her. She was so selfishly vulnerable and deceptively gorgeous in Requiem for a Dream and while I'm happy she hasn't been doing action films since her Oscar win, I am disappointed in her choice in roles since then: placid victims. I was very impressed with Patrick Wilson. Extremely good-looking guy. The children were well-directed. But only Winslet manages to let Sarah writhe and recoil and languish in ways the script and the tone don't dictate. The characters in this satire are merely pawns in an overall game for the surrender of the viewer. But once Field sacrifices them for an imagined victory move, there's no king or queen to threaten our comfort level. You're left feeling like you won a battle without engaging in combat.

Bottom Line: Don't pick a fight with me, Todd. I like you. Winslet and Field fans only. Everyone else. Wait for video.