Newsflash: suburbia has an unsavory underbelly. Yet another film has been made around the tired premise that moms are mean and competitive, men look at pornography on the Internet, and some of your neighbors are perverts. If you stopped watching movies and television right before “American Beauty” came out, you might be shocked by “Little Children.” But for the rest of us, this movie starring Kate Winslet brought nothing worthwhile to the table, with the exception of Winslet herself.
She is so good, so natural and moving, that this movie is almost worth watching for her alone. Almost, but not quite. As a bored Mom whose greatest sin is not her affair with a sweet and cute neighbor, but the fact that she just doesn’t seem to love her little girl enough, Winslet is, as usual, terrific. When the film focuses on her ambivalence as a parent, it has the most interesting things to say. However, she isn’t that involved with her kid, and neither is the film. More’s the pity, because the rest of the movie doesn’t measure up to her.
Among its greatest offenses is its dreadful abuse of a voiceover. Anyone who reads this column regularly (Hi, Mom!) knows my limited tolerance of this go-to device to move a plot along when acting isn’t cutting it; movies like this are the worst offenders.
Possibly, since the script was written by Tom Perrotta, the guy who wrote the source novel material, the problem began when he just couldn’t part with his own lovingly written words, and had to have a God-like narrator intoning the obvious for those of us valiantly staying awake. As annoying as the weird, nature documentary quality of the voiceover was, it was equally disarming when he dropped off through the middle, only to come wrap things up for us as part of the melodramatic finale.
And what would a trouble-in-domestic-paradise flick be without a pockmarked child-molester, living with his determinedly optimistic mom, freaking out the neighborhood? Don’t worry, “Little Children” has one of those, too. Whenever this film veers dangerously close to being a convincing story, he turns up to menace neighbors and viewers alike. His plot arc ends in the silliest, most macabre way of all, and in this movie, that’s a very competitive category.
I’m sure Kate Winslet was happy to get to play a character in a bathing suit instead of a corset for once, but if she wants a believable modern movie, she needs to keep looking, and so do we.
“Little Children” is currently available to rent.
The violent urban coming of age story is not exactly new material either, but “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” with its magnificent cast, makes it matter anew. Robert Downey, Jr., ever the hallmark of a potentially good film, plays a man who escaped the dangers of his New York neighborhood only to revisit it in a novel. He does not revisit it in person until his passionately loving yet blindly single-minded father falls ill. The fact that this father is played by Chazz Palminteri, and that the mother is Dianne Wiest, doesn’t hurt a bit, either.
The film belongs to the son, however, played in the predominating flashbacks by the talented young Shia LaBeouf, who is currently on the big screen in the horror flick “Disturbia.” His is truly a dynamic and exciting presence onscreen; he bridges the gap between awkward and attractive rarely acknowledged in the movies or TV. The father-son relationship in this movie is interesting because it is plagued not by abuse or neglect but by misguided love. It forms the compelling heart of this painful but satisfying film.
“A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” is currently available to rent.
Contact Asia Frey at afrey@lagniappemobile.com.
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