Little Children- 8 out of 10

This review will be a quickie.

Little Children, starring Kate Winslet, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Connelly, and Patrick Wilson, centers on a suburb and its' denizens. It covers the issues of adultery, sex offenders, and happiness. To bring you up to speed, Kate Winslet is a stay at home mom, and Patrick Wilson is a stay at home dad. Neither are entirely happy with their married lives, so they begin to have an affair with one another. Jackie Earle Haley is an sex offender recently out of prison, and living at his mothers. An ex-cop, played by Noah Emmerich, spends his time harassing Haley.

So half the movie is basically about living the middle class suburban life and finding happiness with it, and the other half is about the fear going through the neighborhood what with the sex offender having moved in. I'm always up for a movie discussion with anyone that might have seen this movie, but since this is only a little review, I'm not going to get into the themes and ideas of the movie. However, they are covered so dramatically and wonderfully, even if you think you've seen this type of movie so often before. The affair movie never really entices me, but I really like the way it was done here.

Tom Perrotta, the author that wrote Little Children, also wrote Election, which was made into a movie, and if you've seen Election, you can expect much of the same black humor and sharp wit in this movie. There is a great narration to the movie as well, done by Will Lyman, that adds to the dry humor of the movie.

My only gripe comes that even with the humor involved in the movie, and that the slow pace added to the film so well, sometimes the movie still is not unlike anything you've ever seen before. At times in the movie, it becomes your basic marriage-affair film. It's not incredibly often, but it still takes away from the whole package. This of course goes back my own personal preference in that I do not typically enjoy affair movies. Luckily however, the movie concentrates more on the why of the affair between Winslet and Wilson instead of the "how are they going to cover it up."

Another interesting thing that at least I felt was that, with affair movies I've seen before, the main conflict I feel is "Oh dear, how and when is the hubby going to find out, and what will happen then?". I never felt that with this movie. Instead, the main conflict was how were the lives of Winslet and Wilson going to turn out. Such a nice job is done with making the affair between these two seem so necessary and natural, that whether or not their hubbies find out becomes irrelevant, but rather that the two find happiness, however temporary.

So in the end, this is a really great movie with wonderful performances by everyone, and I absolutely loved the arcs of the characters and how much they made sense. Jackie Earle Haley puts on a great subdued performance as the sexual deviant, Ronald McGorvey. He was apparently in Bad News Bears years ago, but I barely remember that movie.