As I watched Kate Winslet make the awards circuit the past few months for her performance in Mare of Easttown, I came to the stunning realization that one of the greatest actresses of all time is not much older than me. This realization was brought home when Melanie Lynskey won the Best Actress Prize at the Critics Choice awards a few weeks ago for Yellowjackets – the two made their debuts in Peter Jackson’s twisted true story Heavenly Creatures way back in 1991. Since than Winslet has created some of the most memorable female roles in history and worked with some of the greatest talents: Ang Lee and Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility, Charlie Kaufman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stephen Daldry in The Reader, Aaron Sorkin in Steve Jobs. And that’s before you consider her bookend Emmys for her work on Mare of Easttown and Mildred Pierce, exactly ten years apart.
Yet when I think of Winslet’s incredible range of performances, I honestly think the best single film she appeared in and did some of her best work is one that is almost certainly one of her least known. It shouldn’t have been: her work in Little Children was far more restrained and sexual than Titanic, her most famous film and a lot subtler with its eroticism than The Reader, the film in which Hollywood finally gave her an Oscar. But at the time of her nomination in 2006, there seemed more interest in the fact that she earned her fifth nomination before she had turned thirty two – the age that Meryl Streep had earned her first acting nomination – then her actual performance. I don’t blame the media for overlooking her: 2006 was one of the rare years where the Oscars had a full slate of extraordinary female performances to choose from, and they tended to focus on the more senior nominees in the category: Judi Dench, who after being ignored by the Academy for the first forty years of her career, had gotten her sixth nominations for the dark comedy Notes on a Scandal; Helen Mirren, who’d been working in the background of Hollywood and Britain for nearly as long had broken into the mainstream with her work as Elizabeth II in The Queen, and Streep herself had astounded the world with her now iconic performance as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. So it’s natural that Winslet, much younger and in a much smaller film, was acknowledged as a great actress and then ignored for the veterans. But that is not fair either to Winslet or to Little Children which is subtly one of the most brilliant movies I saw in 2006 and indeed still holds up well today.
Little Children is based on the best-selling by Tom Perotta; a writer whose comic looks at suburbia has been among the best adapted works for movies and television. Alexander Payne adapted his short novel in Election in 1999 and it’s become a modern classic. His end-of-the-world novel, The Leftovers was adapted by him and Damon Lindelof for HBO starting in 2014 and is one of the more overlooked masterpieces of the past decade. I have a soft spot in my heart for Mrs. Fletcher, a novel where the title character, at a loss after her son leaves for college, finds herself going down a rabbit hole of a very specific bunch of internet porn as well as the limited series featuring Kathryn Hahn that was made by HBO in 2019.
If there is a common thread in these adaptations, it is that they center around suburban women going through a major transition in life, whether it be as seemingly simple as running for school president or dealing with the fact that your entirely family was Raptured while you were in the kitchen. Sarah, Winslet’s character in Little Children is somewhere in the middle, she is a thirtyish ‘soccer mom with a young daughter named Lucy. Sarah used to be an executive and has become a stay-at-home who we see in playgrounds with other moms. The major difference is, she hates her life and barely loves her own daughter. When the movie opens, she’s in yet another lunch time with the women and she wishes she was anywhere else. Then all of them see the ‘Prom King’, a handsome man around their age with a toddler who none dare approach. One of them offers Sara five bucks if she gets his number.
The two have a conversation as they push their children in the swing. Sarah isn’t so much attracted to him as she doesn’t want to go back to her fellow moms. She mentions the bet, but Brad doesn’t have any paper. To the shock of both of them, she kisses him and then runs away.
Brad, played by Patrick Wilson in one of his first roles as a leading man, is just as lost as Sara is. His wife Kathy is a documentary filmmaker and he’s the stay at home dad. He’s supposed to take the bar in several months and goes to the library every night, but he never makes it past the front door. He keeps watching a bunch of young kids skateboarding. He spends several days analyzing the kiss, and is really surprised that it happened especially because Kathy is, as he’ll tell Sara in perhaps the worst time you can think of ‘a knockout’ compared to Sara. (It is a stretch that anyone who could find Winslet ‘not even that pretty’ but we’ll let that go.) It’s clear they haven’t had sex in a while and in a sense Kathy is quietly pressuring him.
After a problem that has been going on in Sara’s marriage becomes blatantly clear (I won’t reveal it, save that its not what you think) Sara remembers that Brad goes by the pool almost every day, buys swimsuits for her and her daughter and she starts going there. They spend a week before anything really happens, almost entirely because Sara honestly seems to prefer just ‘being around Brad without sex being involved. Then, when rain interrupts an already ruptured day, the two go back to Sara’s house. The inevitable happens…and keeps happening in what is frankly some of the most graphic sex scenes I’ve seen in an R-Rated movie. They’re also among the most funny because of some of the conversation that’s going on while their happening. The first time they have sex; mid coitus Brad actually asks Sara if she feels bad. When she tells him no, he says I do, and then they go back to going at it.
Little Children was nominated for Best Picture as a drama, which has always struck me as another one of the Golden Globes misnomers. Much of the film has the same tone of Perotta’s work, the cruel comedy. Everyone in the major storyline seems to be being seen in a level of ridiculousness even in the middle of the sex scenes. A lot of the laughter, like it was in Election and Mrs. Fletcher is embarrassed, but it’s definitely there. Why I think the film is considering is drama is because of the second major storyline going on, which while it has occasional comic undertones, features truly dark and frankly, brilliant, filmmaking.
Throughout the film there is a discussion of a sex offender who has been released from prison and who the entire neighborhood would rather be strung up. In the early minutes of the movies, the soccer moms are joking about castrating me without meeting him. One night while watching the skateboarders, a friend of Brad’s drives by. His name is Larry (Noah Emmerich in one of his best roles). He was an ex-cop and now he’s in neighborhood watch, determined to ‘protect’ the community from this pervert. Brad joins this watch and soon learns that the only real reason that everybody is in it is for a ‘midnight football team’ against other groups of blue-collar workers’ Brad’s days will soon be spent in bed with Sara and his nights playing football in empty stadiums, leading to a hysterical and joyful moment when his team wins their first game.
Far more serious is Larry’s obsession with the pedophile. He used to be a cop but a shooting got him suspended from the force, and now he spends his days and nights basically doing everything he can to protect the community. His protection essentially becomes harassment and in perhaps his worst moment, Brad asked him why he can’t just let this go. Larry doesn’t have an answer, which leads to a truly horrible moment.
Ray is the sexual deviant that the community fears. He is more talked about than actually see, but the few times we do we see him with his mother (Phyllis Somerville) the only person in town who is willing to stand up for him. Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Ray, was a 1970s child star in films like The Bad News Bears before his career dried up before he became a teenager. His nomination for Best Supporting Actor came as a shock to many people who were certain that it would go to Jack Nicholson in The Departed (what sadly became his later major Oscar worthy performance). It shouldn’t have been. Haley’s performance is one of the most restrained in the film, mainly because his character is doing everything possible not to attract the wrong kind of attention. There are doubts in the movie as to whether he committed the crime he went to prison for (not so in the book) but the court of public opinions, led by Larry, is against him, and in a truly horrific scene midway through the film, we see why.
Two of the best scenes in the movies involve Haley and almost no dialogue. The first comes at the pool. Everyone is enjoying the bright summer day and no one notice Ray appear and then go into the pool. He is happily swimming, when people begin to. Slowly and then in a rush, the pool empties and we see the image of Ray, still frolicking. Security arrives and escorts him out. As he leaves he utters the only line of dialogue: “I was only trying to cool off!” Haley delivers with so blatant frustration that we’re not sure whether or not we believe him.
The second scene comes near the end of the movie. Ray’s mother is dead, and he is truly alone. He’s in the house alone for the first time, and he opens a letter she wrote before she died. It has just one line, and it is so simple that there is no way to read it but that even she never had faith him. Ray has spent the entire movie restrain himself. As the clock in the house chimes, he looks towards the Hummel figurines that his mother collected, and finally explodes. Even this scene, in Haley’s hands, seems sadder than it is angry.
Little Children was the second film written and directed by Todd Field. (His third film Tar is scheduled to come out in October of 2022.) Field had spent many years acting in TV; I actually was a fan of his subtle work in one of my favorite series Once and Again. Field’s first movie In the Bedroom in 2001 was a subtle, minor masterpiece featuring Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek as the parents of a young boy whose affair leads to death and even worse consequences. The film was nominated for five Oscars and won many prizes and won many other awards including Best First Film at the Independent Spirits. Field was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for his first two films and yet astonishingly is only now about to release his third. I realize that it takes many directors huge amounts of time between films and sometimes with auteurs like Terence Malick it can take a miracle to get them to make another. But after making two masterpieces, Field all but disappeared off the face of the earth and I have no idea why.
One of the decisions that Field made for Little Children might have been controversial. The film has a voice-over who unlike almost every other narrator isn’t part of the story. Indeed, this narrator actually spends a great deal of time revealing most of the character’s inner thoughts. This seems odd only in retrospect. At the time and now, I still think its works perfectly given the nature of the book. So much of Perotta’s prose is expressed not in dialogue but in the characters inner thoughts. I honestly can’t see a way that so many of the better sections could have been explained. And in one of the critical scenes in the movie – the football game I discussed – the narrator provides both backstory and comic relief for the situation, bringing gravitas to a scenario that without it would be nonsensical.
Now about the ending. I had mixed emotions about it. It does have certain differences then the one we got in Perotta’s novel; though considering how the book ended I don’t see any way that it would have worked on film. The ending is canon when it comes to the resolution of the story of Brad and Sarah, which no matter how I look at it is a disappointment. But the recent I still think the film works as a whole is because of the approach it takes to the other underlying story, the conflict between Ray and Larry. I won’t give anything away, save only to say that for both characters there is redemption of a sort in it, even though it ends ambiguously and the fact that in the end, the movie considers this storyline just as important as the graphic romance that’s been going on may demonstrate Field has had his priorities about the plot right the whole time. I was left wanting more, which is what the best films do.
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