Rating:
No Stars
by Derek Smith 11/13/06
Another in the long line of films
dedicated to exposing the detriments of suburban conformity and ennui,
Todd
Field's Little Children sees itself as an incisive satire yet
remains so
cruel and humorless that it accomplishes little more than reducing its
characters to puppets unable to behave like human beings. There
are those
who may see this as the film's goal as, after all, its title
presupposes the
eventual end result where every character reverts to the state of
little
children. As interesting as this may sound, Field seems content
to simply
rest his laurels on this conceit suggesting that the lives of his
suburban
characters are so devoid of meaning that destroying them is the only
logical
act. The film is centered on the affair of Sarah and Brad as well
as
Ronnie, who has moved back into town after serving two years in prison
for
indecent exposure to children, and Larry, the ex-cop who channels the
negative
energy from the skeletons in his own closet into torturing Ronnie in
the name
of protecting the town. Serving as pawns in the film's
reductionist game,
it is not surprising that both situations are painfully contrived -
Sarah and
Brad meeting (and kissing) as part of an impromptu act to make her
three
uptight, bitchy companions jealous and Ronnie and Larry filling in the
caricatures of the bullied and bully respectively. The
foundations of
suburbia are, of course, built solely upon unhappy marriages and the
inability
of its inhabitants to escape their high school-defined social status,
right?
Before
going too much further, I'll
first acknowledge the film's slick stylistics which will undoubtedly
grab the
attention of Oscar voters. As his inability to infuse satire with
the
necessary irony marks Field's failure to be subversive and funny like
his
mentor Stanley Kubrick was in films like Dr. Strangelove, his
visuals
remain a pretty surface creating a cold distance between his audience
and the
film without ever offering any original insights about his
subjects. The
glossiness keeps us on the surface allowing its mockery of the
characters to
appear insightful while lacking any genuine human interaction making it
nearly
impossible to see how this applies to any people or setting in the real
world. It's not in the lack of "realistic" characters that the
film fails - any satire will consist of exaggerations and
over-simplifications
- but in the condescending way it presents their failures and sets up
their
fates as inescapable only because of their environment.
Larry and
his old police buddies
are presented on multiple occasions as nothing more than
machismo-driven
machines who believe success runs hand-in-hand with violent
competition.
Ronnie - as well as Sarah's husband's escapades with a pair of panties
he
purchased on the internet - is more than a mere allusion to Todd
Solondz's
films right down to Jane Adams virtual reprisal of her role in Happiness
showing that the segments which have the most satirical bite are
achieved only
through imitation and regurgitation. Sarah, who is set up as the
one
intelligent character, eventually becomes a victim to her own
intellectual
devices as she uses her evolving interpretations of Madame Bovary
to
justify her own affair and, like everyone else, delude herself into
believing
an escape from her oppressive environment is possible. In each
case, the
characters struggle with the constraints their surroundings put on
them, yet
each attempt is proven hopelessly naive to the point that it only
hastens their
own self-destruction. The problem with this assertion is that
it’s a case
of Field wanting to have his cake and eat it too - those who conform
like Jean
are fools for not sensing the pointlessness of their existence and
those
who fight against the wave of suburban dehumanization are perhaps
even
more foolish for engaging in such a Sisyphusian task as trying to
escape the
inescapable.
Perhaps Little Children would have worked
had it focused more on deconstructing suburbia rather than toying with
clichéd
characters whose hopeless lives are exploited only for the purpose of
saying
the same things that dozens of similar films have said before.
From the
grating voice-over which miserably fails to provide an ironic
counterpoint to
the on-screen action (where a film like Dogville succeeds
admirably) to
the forced conclusion, the film gets most of its mileage by examining
the
characters like fish out of water, only to crush them in the end. It is a merciless film, but unlike other
directors who have used cruelty and irony to expose hidden truths of a
particular ethos, Field revels in their suffering coming away only with
the
simple "revelation" that suburbia is a destructive force that entraps
and destroys all of its inhabitants. Even if one were to accept
this as a
universal truth - and the film certainly attempts to portray it as one
- it is
far from intriguing or penetrating enough to justify the smug,
holier-than-thou
treatment of its characters. After all,
what is the sense in constructing an environment which destroys both
the
ignorant and the enlightened only to spend the entire film watching the
inevitable destruction occur? Field may
have found a somewhat original way for the paths of his characters to
play out,
but the end result is a diatribe that preaches to the choir
without offering
any solution to the problem.
Cinematic
Reflections