Little Children

For weeks now, all I've wanted is to see a movie in a movie theater. I'm not quite sure why it hasn't happened. There are tons of movies I want to see, and several of them were playing around the corner. My dad stayed with us for two weeks, which means that theoretically I was free in the evenings. But kids were sick, S was at work, I had work, it was cold, I was tired: somehow my desire was endlessly thwarted, becoming, in the process, as desires do, that much larger, until, truly, all I wanted in the world was to see a movie in a movie theater (world peace would be nice too, but one's vision narrows in the depths of winter).

Last night I finally made it (sorry, Lucy, S got home at the last minute and pushed me out the door). Borat and The Departed are no longer playing around the corner, and I realized that if I could manage to see three movies this week (ha!) I would at least have seen all the Best Actress nominees, so I went to Little Children.

My main reaction at first was that I either need to give up reading, or give up seeing movie adaptations of books I've read (this doesn't bode well for Notes on a Scandal which I am absolutely determined to see by Sunday--don't know if I'll make it to Volver, though). The movie was fine, but knowing exactly what was going to happen made the whole thing a little slow. It's a pretty faithful adaptation, as far as I can recall. The only significant (and unnecessary) addition was the documentary about the kid whose dad died in Iraq; the only significant omission was the paring down of Sarah's back story and her husband's role (though the absence of the back story, at least, may have made Sarah's character not make so much sense, for those who haven't read the book).

Eventually, though, I got into it and, really, I think I liked the movie better than the book (didn't like the book that much, liked the movie a lot more than I thought I would). The book is pretty frothy, but the movie convincingly, if direly, plumbs the dark side of the suburbs, albeit with a conservatively redemptive ending. The acting, from the playground ladies to the child molester, is excellent, and the cinematography appropriately dark and garish (yes, it can be both). The one thing that didn't work, really didn't work, to the point of making the movie significantly less good than it could have been, was the intrusive voiceover. Isn't the point of film to show, rather than tell? Shouldn't the filmmaking be sufficient to reveal how the characters feel and what they think? Isn't that why we go to the movie, instead of reading the novel?

As for the Best Actress issue, Kate Winslet is great. Physically and emotionally, she fully inhabits Sarah, the ill-fitting suburban mom who doesn't like her child and finds herself in the arms of Brad, the Prom King dad. But the part isn't a full-scale unrecognizable transformation, a la The Queen, so I'd still say the conventional wisdom (i.e. Helen Mirren) is right.

(The weirdest thing about watching the movie was that both Sarah and Brad, the Prom King, reminded me acutely of actual people I know--people who don't know each other, and would never have an affair, though the Brad doppelganger may be on his way to an affair with someone else. Even as I watched the characters on the screen, I couldn't stop thinking about the real people.)

Edited to add: The NY Times review is excellently on the mark (not sure whether it's available without Times Select).