Reviewed - Little Children: THERE was a time when American cinema idealised suburbia as the ultimate goal, an idyllic haven of home comforts and good neighbours. It's a different world in more recent movies, from Blue Velvet to American Beauty to Happiness, where suburban locations signal an exposure of the malaises and anxieties lurking under the landscaped lawns.
Writer-director Todd Field has been here before, depicting the wrenching tragedy that befalls a New England family in his highly auspicious 2001 debut film, In the Bedroom, and he returns there for another exemplary literary adaptation in Little Children, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta and set in Massachusetts.
The film opens in a playground where mothers sit around, discussing their perfectly ordered lives; one remarks that sex with her husband is scheduled for 9pm on Tuesdays. Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) sits apart, regarding herself, the unseen narrator observes, as a researcher studying these women, but not one of them. However, she shares their fascination with Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), a tanned, good-looking former athlete who takes care of his son while his wife (Jennifer Connelly) works on her latest documentary, interviewing a boy whose soldier father was killed in Iraq.
The other mother in the movie, May McGorvey (Phyllis Somerville), is fiercely protective of her middle-aged son, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), a paroled sex offender whose return home sparks tensions in the community and harassment from an embittered ex-cop (Noah Emmerich).
Ronnie is not the only cuckoo in this nest; the other is desire, passionately expressed in the relationship that forms between Sarah and Brad after their first, playful kiss.
Field skilfully intersects all these characters as he explores them, and their parallel paths gradually - and inevitably - converge. None of them is reduced to caricature or treated with condescension, and Field and Perrotta, who collaborated on the screenplay, invest them with artfully nuanced shadings of complexity that prompt several surprises.
Even the introduction of the off-screen narrator - a device that initially jars and evokes Martin Scorsese's overuse of Edith Wharton's literary text in The Age of Innocence - works perfectly as a wry commentary on their behaviour.
Little Children constitutes deeply absorbing, thoughtful and insightful cinema that is as sensitive as it is challenging. It is graced with some of the finest screen acting of recent years, most remarkably in the performances of Winslet (never more impressive), Wilson (from Hard Candy and Angels in America), and Haley in a quietly powerful comeback.
