Little Children (film)

Sarah Pierce lives with her husband Richard and daughter Lucy in suburban Boston. Their marriage falls apart when she discovers his addiction to Internet pornography. One day, she meets Brad Adamson, a married law student who brings his 4-year-old son, Aaron, to the park. Brad and Sarah become friendly and, on a dare, kiss in the park, but resolve not to act on their mutual attraction.

One day, several parents panic when they see recently paroled sex offender Ronnie J. McGorvey snorkeling in the pool with the children. After he is escorted away by the police, Sarah and Brad take Lucy and Aaron back to her house and put the kids to bed. While Sarah is drying towels in her basement, Brad comes down and they have sex.

Ronnie lives with his mother, May, who believes that Ronnie's pedophilia would be cured if he met a woman his own age. Ronnie reluctantly agrees to go on a date May has arranged for him with a woman named Sheila, which ends badly when he masturbates next to her in her car by a children's playground.

When Brad skips taking the bar exam again, his wife Kathy grows suspicious and tells him to invite Sarah, Richard, and Lucy over for dinner. The intimacy evident between Brad and Sarah confirms her suspicions, and Kathy arranges for her mother to come for an extended visit. When Brad's football team plays its final game, Sarah attends and cheers as Brad scores the winning touchdown. Afterwards, they make out on the field, with Brad convincing her to run away with him.

Brad's friend Larry Hedges, a former police officer who went on disability after accidentally killing a little boy, spends much of his time harassing Ronnie. One night, he enters Ronnie's neighborhood with a megaphone. May comes out to confront him, suffering a heart attack in the process when Larry pushes her to the ground, causing him to be arrested. May is taken to a hospital, where she dies. When Ronnie returns home from the hospital, he finds a letter written by May saying: "Please be a good boy." Distraught, Ronnie destroys much of his mother's collection of Hummel figurines before grabbing a knife.

That same night, Sarah and Brad agree to run away together, and plan to meet in the park. As he heads to the park, he is distracted by skateboarding teenagers. Attempting to try a jump himself, he knocks himself out. When he regains consciousness, he asks the paramedics to call his wife to meet him at the hospital.

When Sarah takes Lucy to the park, she sees Ronnie stagger onto one of the swings, revealing to her that his mother died. When Lucy disappears, Sarah panics and rushes to find her, forgetting about Brad. She finds her staring at a street lamp and places her back into her car. Larry arrives to apologize to Ronnie about May, but when he discovers that Ronnie has castrated himself and is bleeding to death, he races him to the hospital, the same time as Kathy meets Brad there.

 

For this film, director Todd Field and novelist Tom Perrotta intended to take the story in a separate and somewhat different direction than the novel. "When Todd and I began collaborating on the script, we were hoping to make something new out of the material, rather than simply reproducing the book onto film," says Perrotta.^[5]

Kate Winslet said she was left with a bruised bottom after filming her sex scene in a sink.^[6]

 

 

The performances of Kate Winslet and Jackie Earle Haley garnered critical acclaim, earning them Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor respectively.

The film was well-received. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 80% approval rating based on 162 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Little Children takes a penetrating look at suburbia and its flawed individuals with an unflinching yet humane eye.”^[7] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 75 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews.”^[8]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote:

Mr. Field proves to be among the most literary of American filmmakers. In too many recent movies intelligence is woefully undervalued, and it is this quality—even more than its considerable beauty—that distinguishes Little Children from its peers. A movie that is challenging, accessible, and hard to stop thinking about.^[9]

Scott later placed Little Children ninth on his list of the top 10 films of 2006.^[10]

Carina Chocano of The Los Angeles Times also praised the film:

Little Children is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind—a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring—the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.^[11]

The film received multiple awards and accolades, including three Academy Award nominations: Best Actress for Kate Winslet, Best Supporting Actor for Jackie Earle Haley, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Todd Field and Tom Perrotta.^[12]

Little Children was listed on many critics' top ten lists.^[13]

35mm safety prints are housed in both the UCLA Film & Television Archive^[15] and the Museum of Modern Art's permanent film collection.^[16]

The film was released on DVD on May 1, 2007. The DVD does not include extra features or a director's commentary.^[17]

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Little Children (film).

• Little Children at IMDb
• Little Children at Box Office Mojo
• Little Children at Rotten Tomatoes
• Little Children at Metacritic