DVD REVIEW: Little Children

In my Top Movies 2006 list I mention Little Children as a film I had not yet seen but one that, perhaps, due to its critical adulation would be on that list. Well, now having watched it I can safely say that it would have had no impact at all on that list. It is not bad enough to have made any mention, even on my short list of the two worst I saw all year but it is an awful film nonetheless.

The story can be summed up as thus: uninteresting characters making uninspired choices. Lets see, we have vulture-like housewives who watch over their children in a local playground. The most bored of these housewives ends up in an affair with a clueless househusband. We know she is the most bored because we are told what subject she studied in college and that information is supposed to make her the most interesting of all the cardboard caricatures that inhabit this story. Throw in a porn addicted husband, a battle-ax mother-in-law, an ex-cop with mental problems, and some very creepy scenes involving a pederast and you have what most critics considered some sort of modern masterpiece. Instead it is the most boring, uninvolving film I have seen in some time.

I suppose certain middle-aged critics who may live in suburbia can find something to relate to. I have no idea. I also never understood why Todd Field’s first film In the Bedroom was so well received. Field may well be the most overrated filmmaker working today. “Lesser” movies, those that don’t aspire through marketing or literary pedigree to be taken as “serious films”, are often derided for the same reasons Little Children and In the Bedroom were praised: coincidences and poor character choices done solely to move towards the end of the story. In action movies it is called cliché, but, for some reason beyond my comprehension, in Todd Field’s overwrought dramas it is considered art.