My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 32): Little Children

Little Children (2006)

Directed by Todd Field

Starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson

 US director Todd Field (b. 1964) is an enigma. In the early part of this century he made two outstanding films that dissected and probed into the American consciousness, In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children. Both have vividly written characters that have depth and resonance that lasts well after you have seen the movie. Like the great European directors, he writes his own screenplays, as a true auteur in the mode of Bergman or Lars von Trier. There is a unity of execution in these two movies that portended a brilliant film career, perhaps one to reach the levels of the greats. But then something happened. Field has vanished, with some proposed collaborations with major authors like Cormac McCarthy and Joan Didion never coming to fruition. Very strange, and quite sad, because these two films are superb, perhaps the strongest debut by any US director since Mike Nichols made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967).

Little Children is well-named, and deals with all kinds of children. There is a “child molester” (actually a convicted exposer) who moves into a bland suburban neighborhood and is relentlessly harassed by an ex-cop who himself has a dark past, having shot a young black man with questionable cause (hints of Black Lives Matters, fifteen years ago). There is the beautiful, bland, and child-like Brad (good name, played by Patrick Wilson) who has the perfect family but irresponsibly puts his family in jeopardy to have a torrid affair with another frustrated suburban spouse, Sarah (the outstanding Kate Winslet). Then there are the suburban moms, a sort of Greek chorus who supply commentary and faux morality on all the comings and goings in the neighborhood, all while carefully supervising every action of their children. All this is a perfect commentary on Millennial and Gen Z parenting styles. The plot is simple, mainly observing the progress of an extramarital affair, with a single subplot of the child-abuser in the neighborhood. The meat lies is in the vivid characters that remind you of people you know (and mostly dislike).

Just like In the Bedroom, Field has a way of presenting his conflicted, flawed characters as Shakespeare did, not allowing any of them to be purely good or evil, and making us see how we might fall prey to all of their flaws. Field does this without the theatrical anti-suburban cynicism of Sam Mendes’s earlier (1999) American Beauty, nor with the ridicule and dark comedic farce of Todd Solandz’ 1998 gem Happiness. Together, these four films form a scathing tetralogy about modern, well-educated Gen X Americans, including how they try to control their children and themselves, but fail utterly. On re-viewing, I find Field’s two films the most convincing and timeless of this quartet, as their characters do not fall into the caricature of the Kevin Spacey role of the child-pursuing husband in American Beauty (by the way, there is an example of how a movie character presaged the downfall of the actor).  Field has an acute sense of how to write a screenplay replete with dialogue and motivations that seem real and uncontrived. Yet the characters are not just realist clones of our neighbors, also but have memorability that makes you think about them weeks later. The only real analogy I have is Ingmar Bergman, who had a similar ability to portray real people with memorable zing. I truly hope Mr. Field overcomes whatever has prevented his career from continuing. I want to see more such films.