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Critics Consensus: Little Children takes a penetrating look at suburbia and its flawed individuals with an unflinching yet humane eye.
Critic Consensus: Little Children takes a penetrating look at suburbia and its flawed individuals with an unflinching yet humane eye.
All Critics (161) | Top Critics (46) | Fresh (128) | Rotten (33) | DVD (12)
Little Children is disturbing and smart and the best satire of modern American suburbia since American Beauty.
Well-acted and meticulously crafted, Little Children can feel less like a full-blooded representation of life than a disquieting literary exercise.
I didn't like any of these characters, but I kept pulling for them anyway -- right up to the shock-o-riffic ending, when I felt I'd been sucker-punched.
As in Field's first film, the characters are drawn with such compassion their follies become our own and their desires seem as vast as the night sky.
Little Children includes all the clichéd scenarios of a midday TV sudser, but they're ratcheted up several seedy degrees.
Little Children slowly loses its grip, becoming just another story about infidelity, albeit an exceptionally polished, well-acted one.
Little Children is a superb adaptation, which is, nevertheless, slightly let down by too much exposition that comes from a desire to give too many characters meaningful time on screen.
That a movie can inspire smirks in the same scene where a potential predator is seen scuba diving in the community swimming pool underneath hundreds of young children is one of the most notable feats of any modern motion picture.
Playing up her sturdiness, her furry dark brows and the wiry unruliness of her old-gold hair, Winslet is the best Emma Bovary I've seen-even if she's named Sarah, not Emma.
More than just another dissection of suburban sexual frustration, its concern with children, parents and those of us who lie somewhere in-between make Little Children a minor masterpiece.
It's not necessarily a cautionary tale, but more a look within a surface utopia that doesn't really exist.
As commentary on our time, it may be accurate. As movie drama, it isn't so much overheated as reheated in the microwave on high.
A good film, with some good acting talent. A tale of 2 people that meet and start ana affiar to escape their normal everyday lives. Although the sub plot of a child abuser being released back into their community didn't really fit in with the rest of the film.
Super Reviewer
Maybe my lack of understanding is what provides a low rating compared to its apparent popularity, but there is simply nothing to like about this pointless and uneventful movie about being disenchanted and disconnected with the world and people around you.
Author Tom Perrotta joined up with director/sometimes actor Todd Field to make an adaptation of his novel about the woes of living in suburbia, especially where the effects of adultery and having a registered sex offender living nearby are concerned. Incidentally, this is a lot like Revolutionary Road (and both star Kate Winslet), but this one is far less depressing, and has more obvious notes of sardonic satire. The film starts off really cooking with some sharp and rather witty satire, but then eventually devolves into overwrought melodrama that runs overlong and doesn't really tell me me anything I didn't really already know. Plus, the movie makes it seem like all suburbanites suffer like these characters do, and that's just not the case at all. I did enjoy the film a fair amount though, that much is certain. I'm mixed about the use of narration, especially since it mostly tells instead of showing, which gets to me. Also, I think the subplot about the sex offender could have been better incorporated into the story, especially since it is some of the best material here, with Jackie Earle Haley giving a brilliant performance in a really tough and unenviable role. The stuff concerning adultery and midlife crisis is somewhat on the nose and reeks of rehahing of better movies, but it is still decently well played, and no one here really gives a bad performance, although Connelly could have been used more, and it did sorta seem like the actors were fishing for Oscars at times. Still, the film looks great, the music's not bad, and I wasn't really as bored as I could have been.
This was well on it's way to being an excellent movie - and then it just lost it's own thread.
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