Little Children

[modage]

yeah she's complete window dressing.  from the mysterious trailer and my own expectations i'd kinda thought that she was going to have about as much screentime as winslet or wilson but that is not the case at all. 

[picolas]

i agree with a lot of what mod said but i liked it more and i really want to see it again now. i'm not sure if it's as good as in the bedroom.. they're very different, but have lots in common.. i'd really like to see field do something not involving families, though. because he has so much range within this. i'm going to watch that episode of carnivale he did..

[samsong]

beautifully shot and "uncompromising" (as said in the most dubious tone possible).  i hated this movie.

[Ravi]

SPOILERS

it was a good film, (with a lowercase g).  i liked it more than In The Bedroom, but i'm not sure if it was actually a better film, or if it's because kate winslet is infinitely more watchable than nick stahl.  either way, there was lots to admire here but it wasnt earth shattering.   one of the strangest (and most annoying) things in the film is the way its narrated like a book telling you what characters are feeling when you can clearly see what is happening.  kate winslet is awesome though (but not a bisexual) and the sex offendor was SO convincing to look at him was to be creeped out.  jennifer connelly unfortunately is practically a non-character in the film, and is really only in it for a few minutes. and even then (like her character) usually at a distance.  for the suburban angst set of films this is probably one of the more interesting ones miles better than We Don't Live Here Anymore, but still, eh. 

I hated the narration.  The vast majority of the narrated footage could be understood without the narration, and some scenes (like Kathy dropping the fork) could have been reworked so that they worked without the narration.  Most, if not all, of the narration was straight from the book.

This film/book is good because its not trying to be an indictment of suburbia, nor does it pretend that its some big surprise that not all is perfect.  Its just about the characters and their situations.  Its not an extraordinary film, but it is thought-provoking.

The book is very good.  Its written in a rather elliptical style that I doubted would translate to the screen.  Between one chapter and another, there might be a time lapse, and not every event is fully explained.  Perrotta fleshed out the characters well, with characters' thoughts, backstories, and a couple of subplots that of course could not be included in the film.  I liked the ending of the film better, with Ronnie castrating himself and Larry taking him to the hospital (and the omission of Ronnie's confessing to killing that girl), but I preferred the way the book portrayed closure for Sarah and Todd (changed to Brad for the film).

Ronnie in the book is less outwardly sympathetic.  He's still sympathetic, but his manner is more abrasive than in the film.

Jackie Earle Haley is great.  According to IMDB this is his first role in 13 years.  Where the hell has this guy been? 

[w/o horse]

Was the ending outrageous and subtle or outrageous and readable.  Because the ending rolled over me and made the whole thing feel cheap.  Was it simply a film about insescapable destiny awash with over burdening character conflict?  I've never seen a movie take itself so serious.

[Sunrise]

I've never seen a movie take itself so serious.

Have you seen this?

[samsong]

this one gives that a run for its money.

[MacGuffin]

Making film fun of suburbia? Not this East Portland native
Suburbia swirls with sex, revenge, betrayal in 'Little Children'
SHAWN LEVY; The Oregonian

Maybe it's because he started to make movies not as a wide-eyed film student but as a full-fledged grown-up with a wife, children, a mortgage and such, but Todd Field, the Portland-raised actor and director, has focused his work not on quirky little obsessions but on the big emotional issues that haunt adults in this world: fear and lust, money and sex, revenge and betrayal, guilt, despair and death.

For his first full-length film, 2001's "In the Bedroom," Field received two Oscar nominations (best picture, best adapted screenplay) and set the bar very high for his future work. Now he's back with "Little Children," a slicker film with a wider scope that nevertheless carries the hallmarks of "In the Bedroom": powerful acting, precise craft, blistering emotion and a sense of human complexity that feels more literary than cinematic.

The film, which opens in Portland in November, is based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta and stars Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson as suburban parents who become lovers at a time when their neighborhood is turned upside-down by the appearance of a convicted sex offender in its midst. Its heated and intense course wends us through passages of romance, terror and droll social satire. It's deeply accomplished work, another strong Oscar contender.

Field, who once made a name as an actor in such films as "Ruby in Paradise" and "Eyes Wide Shut," is now strongly established as a director. He lives in Maine with his wife and their three children. But his conversation is studded with references to Portland, the town where his mom and dad still live and the place he thinks of as home.

"Little Children" has several narrative threads to follow. Did the film's shape change as you went from the novel to the shoot to the final edit?

Well, literature is very portable. You pick it up, you set it down, you come back to it a week later, it's a different spatial relationship. But when you work on a script it becomes something else. And then when the actors come in it becomes something else -- hopefully -- because you have the opportunity to suddenly have dozens of collaborators looking at things through different eyes and maybe having a completely different idea of what a scene is about. And that might be 10 times more interesting than where you began. And then you get into editing, and film is very plastic: sometimes it says 'yes, master' and sometimes it says, 'no, I won't do that.' And you begin to develop the rhythm of what the film is telling you it wants to be . . . and that's your final rewrite.

There's a more arch tone here than in "In the Bedroom," and I wonder if it concerns you that the film might be seen as a satire or critique of suburbia.

I came to the New York Film Festival the other night and I was introduced as 'Todd Field, the great sender-up of suburbia,' and I wanted to jump out of the balcony. I mean, what does 'In the Bedroom' have to do with suburbia? It's set in a fishing village of 10,000 people in mid-coast Maine! It's the one thing that made me hesitate in taking on the project: God forbid anyone thinks that I'm making fun of suburbia. I hate that. And what affected me about this book is too important to get ruined by that sort of interpretation. You know, I grew up in the suburbs. I grew up in East (Multnomah) County, and I'm a product of the suburbs, and I don't believe that those are little people in the suburbs. All my best friends are from the suburbs; my life is completely defined by the suburbs. And what is suburbia? What we think of as upper-middle class bourgeois suburbia is the whole country now. It's New York City. The first two lines of this movie, with those women sitting on the bench, are words I overheard on the Upper East Side in Central Park in a playground -- women sitting there with $3,500 bags!

In fact, there's a surreal quality to this film that seems to remove it from any specific place or even time -- it could be an English or even an African village with only the superficial elements changing.

That's right. Look at the settings and even the clothes they're wearing. There's nothing real about them. It's very much like a stage play. It's slightly heightened. That playground? That's a playground from my childhood. I've never taken my children to a playground like that. It doesn't exist. It's incredibly idyllic. Those play structures are things that you and I played on when we were children. They don't make those any more. We had to go to a lot of trouble to get them. That house with the clocks? There's no Freudian interpretation there or a nod to Bergman; I grew up in a house full of clocks. My friends used to come over and they'd say, 'Don't you go crazy?' and I'd say, 'What?' and they'd say 'The clocks!' And I'd be like, 'Whattaya mean?' So this is a dream community, and it's a dream community built on impressions of my own childhood.

Did you grow up in a suburban environment?

It was like suburbia bordering on dairies and orchards and wild spaces. But I was also in downtown Portland. I spent my days downtown. You know, we're peddled so much fear now, and children are so smothered and not allowed to have any private interior life. I am so grateful to my parents for letting me figure out who I was by the time I was like 13 years old. And the reason I was able to do that was because they allowed me to pick berries in the summertime out in Gresham near Blue Lake and take my money and go everywhere as long as I was home by sundown. They let me go to take a Tri-Met bus on Division and go downtown when I was like 10 years old -- alone! -- and go to the House of Magic, and take card lessons, and have cards cut down to fit my hands, because I was interested in magic.

It's hard to imagine parents giving kids so much freedom today. 

Well, my mom did tell me horror stories about bad men doing bad things to people -- and in today's psychology you would say, 'You should never say such things to children.' But she did me a favor. And that's what fairy tales were made for. And that's how I see this film -- as a fairy tale. Grimm's fairy tales are very gruesome and they're made to teach children moral lessons and that there's bad in the world and that you should be careful. But you should be careful: You don't have to be minded and have your time scheduled so that your parents are in charge of you. You have to take responsibility.

As in "In the Bedroom," you have some wonderful performances from actors who aren't immediately familiar to the viewer.

At the New York Film Festival, people were coming up to me and saying, 'I'm so glad Phyllis Somerville is in the movie. I love her.' And they know her because they frequent the New York stage. And the women in the book club scene: These women are legends in New York acting. They're known. But they've been riding the boards and not the lens for -- in some cases -- 40 years or more. Film isn't really an actor's medium. It really isn't. You're at the mercy of whoever is putting the film together. They can change your performance one way or another. They can put a line in your mouth, they can put a breath in your mouth, they can make you too loud or too soft, they can destroy the rhythm of a scene that you've tried to build up. But the stage is the actor's realm, and if you can work consistently on stage, there's potentially great, great meaning in that.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Todd Field's "Mystic River" Moment 

Sunday's paper included my q-and-a with Todd Field, the Oregon-bred writer-director ("In the Bedroom") and actor ("Ruby in Paradise," "Eyes Wide Shut"). The article dealt mainly with his new film, "Little Children," which I think is brilliant but which is getting a very scattershot release from its distributor and, frankly, may be in trouble (it was meant to open in Portland on Nov. 3, but that date has been pulled and no new date has yet been announced). "Little Children" should be a serious Oscar contender, but I've seen better films get similarly shafted by clueless distributors and wind up out in the cold come awards season.

Anyway, it turns out that Field has been through scarier stuff. The article we ran yesterday didn't have space for an amazing story that he told me in the course of describing how his parents gave him the freedom to discover himself as a young boy. As it's a hair-raising tale that relates to various themes of "Little Children," I thought it would be worth excerpting here:

"I remember coming home one day on my bicycle along this gravel path near 157th and Division, and this Ford Falcon pulled up, this white Ford Falcon with two guys in it, and they said 'Come 'ere kid, come 'ere.' And you know when you're near trouble, at any age. And I knew they were bad, and I knew they were gonna get me in that car, and I knew that no one was every gonna see me again and they would do bad things to me and I would be dead. And I was screaming and tried to get away, and my bike fell in the gravel and they started chasing me, and lo and behold the next-door neighbor started coming down the street and saw me, and these guys ran and they sped off. And they didn't catch them. And I went home and I told my parents and they didn't show the fear that they had about the situation, but they didn't stop letting me have my independence. And that's what formed me as a human being: being allowed to have that childhood. And I wouldn't trade that for anything. I'd just as soon have gone off in that car and not exist as not have the childhood that I had, which was tremendous -- a great, great childhood. And as I've observed other parents in places I've lived -- Los Angeles, New York and even London -- it was a rare childhood. And it didn't have to do with my parents being good consumers and going out and buying everything and making you safe. They let us be as children and let us be feral and let us figure out who we were. They let us fight our own battles and some of them were hard."

[bonanzataz]

wow, i can't believe so many of you guys didn't like this movie. i think it's the best thing i've seen all year. i never read the book, but damn, these characters are all so believeable and there are so many amazing little moments from all the actors, i never wanted it to end. at first, yeah, the narration was kind of annoying, but then it started to make sense. it dropped out for a lot of the movie after the beginning and then when it showed up, it added loads to certain scenes and gave them this weird feeling of detachment. i feel like it was used a lot in the beginning so the audience could get used to it and let it wash over them. i would love to see this again, unfortunately, i have a bunch of other shit i gotta see first. this awards season is really shaping up, lotta good stuff out. anyway, if you haven't seen this movie yet, do yourself a favor and go see it on the big screen.

sorry, this post is kinda useless, but i really wanted to bump the thread so people wouldn't forget about the movie.

[for petes sake]

wow, i can't believe so many of you guys didn't like this movie. i think it's the best thing i've seen all year. i never read the book, but damn, these characters are all so believeable and there are so many amazing little moments from all the actors, i never wanted it to end. at first, yeah, the narration was kind of annoying, but then it started to make sense. it dropped out for a lot of the movie after the beginning and then when it showed up, it added loads to certain scenes and gave them this weird feeling of detachment. i feel like it was used a lot in the beginning so the audience could get used to it and let it wash over them. i would love to see this again, unfortunately, i have a bunch of other shit i gotta see first. this awards season is really shaping up, lotta good stuff out. anyway, if you haven't seen this movie yet, do yourself a favor and go see it on the big screen.

sorry, this post is kinda useless, but i really wanted to bump the thread so people wouldn't forget about the movie.

Agreed.  I really liked this film and I'm surprised there's not more discussion about it here.  Maybe it's still in too limited of a release?

[A Matter Of Chance]

I really liked it.

[MacGuffin]

Acting all grown up in a land of 'Children'
Todd Field set out to tell a mature, literate tale. He's seen enough not to waste a 'mind-blowing' opportunity.
Source: Los Angeles Times

"DON'T age. Make sure you dress like you're 15 years old. Have grand sex until you're 80. And God forbid you should ever grow up or be serious-minded or have a discipline or pursuits, and think that somehow there is value in that."

Actor-turned-director Todd Field is sitting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, excoriating perpetual youth culture, something his generation ushered into being, lived by the sword of and now seems to regret every day of its life — not the least when trying to fashion serious entertainments. It's a resonant theme in Field's second feature, "Little Children," based on a novel by Tom Perrotta ("Election"), who co-wrote the script with Field. In this ensemble coming-of-age story, the characters are all old enough to know better.

Nominated for a slew of awards, including three (elusive) Golden Globes, and with potential Oscar interest come the announcements Tuesday, the film makes good on the promise exhibited in Field's first feature, 2001's brutal drama "In the Bedroom," based on an Andre Dubus short story, which pitted Tom Wilkinson against Sissy Spacek in a devious reimagining of "Macbeth." That film seemed to come out of nowhere to garner Oscar nominations for best actor, actress, adapted screenplay and picture.

By contrast, "Little Children," which opened to generally warm reviews and is being rolled out slowly, is what the 42-year-old Field, the father of three, terms "a satirical melodrama" — he and Perrotta have leavened it with humor, given it an authoritative voice-over narration to keep it on the rails (by "Frontline's" Will Lyman, no less) and embellished it with moments of poetic precision that evince an actor's instinct for the telling detail. Kate Winslet (whom critics have singled out and Field calls indefatigable) applies her Pan-American accent to Sarah, a lapsed literary doctoral candidate whose suburban anthropology and postmodern rejection of the pleasures of the text have made her a walking target for an opportunistic strain of romanticism — wearing "Madame Bovary" like a badge and hiding her lover's photo in a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Her contemporaries — "Angels in America's" Patrick Wilson as a prom king trapped in a distended adolescence, Jennifer Connelly as the distant wife he has recast as his mother and Noah Emmerich as a tarnished former cop and self-appointed hall monitor to this suburban redoubt — all cling to the last vestiges of what might kindly still be referred to as youth, out of a fear of the alternative.

This is exacerbated by the sudden presence of a convicted child molester in their midst — child star Jackie Earle Haley ("The Bad News Bears," "Breaking Away"), returning to films after a 13-year hiatus — presumably a threat to the nominal little children in their community. As such, the film comes off as a benign, more forgiving version of Todd Solondz's "Happiness," one less intent on punishing its audience than allowing its protagonists a benediction of momentary grace.

"There are two things I didn't want referenced: Todd Solondz and 'American Beauty,' " says Field. "My one hesitation in making this film is that it will be perceived as some kind of send-up of suburbia. I have no interest in doing that — that field's been plowed for 50 years. I've lived in New York, I've lived in London and I live in the middle of nowhere now [rural Maine], and I just don't think it's that simple. I don't think there are those 'little people.' I don't buy that."

Instead, Field and his collaborator focused on what he terms "playground politics." (The film opens and closes on a neighborhood park, the final shot a haunting image straight out of Terrence Malick, save that instead of the lush foliage of the New World, it's rusted swings at night swirling in the breeze.)

Casually quoting Montaigne's admonition that "the play of children is not really play, but must be judged as their most serious actions," he reduces the complex interplay of social manners to an overlapping system of internecine judgments — a virtual preschool with money — that functions equally well as cultural commentary and as an allegory for current events.

"If we weren't groomed to be adolescents, we would be terrible consumers," says Field. "We'd be responsible with our money, we'd buy things that last, we'd insist on quality and we'd spend our time in pursuits that had meaning for us, rather than just plugging ourselves into the consumer engine. We're like catfish at the bottom of Hoover Dam with our mouths open, and our tails just get bigger and bigger.

"Which is also the state of our country right now. We're living in this really paranoid, anxious time where people are saying there are evildoers, let's go kill them, and where we're all terrified of not being accepted as whatever is proper in the culture.

"So Larry [Emmerich] is like George Bush, this pastiche of behavior he's observed from elsewhere — football, cops, anything that reeks of masculinity; he's walking around like a kid with a stick looking for someone to hit. And Ronnie [Haley] is simply 'the other' — let's send him down to Guantanamo, because he looks funny and he said some things."

A bookish sort

FIELD displays a distinctly writerly sensibility — one he has apparently come by honestly. He is married to the writer Serena Rathbun, who scripted his AFI short "Nonnie and Alex" and is the daughter of screenwriter Bo Goldman ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Melvin and Howard"). And his whole family reads voraciously. "In my house, you could spit and hit a book," says Field. "My son reads 400 pages a day; we have to hide books from him to get him to stop."

Field says he was initially attracted to "Little Children" because of author Perrotta's voice, "and I wasn't so keen about losing that. If you look at Jane Austen or Tolstoy or [George] Eliot for that matter, the idea of third-person narration and characters' interior lives reflected back into it was really the creation of the novel. So then it became: What are the rules of this framing? And it was very simple for us: Every single character has a moment of introduction and a moment of their interior life being reflected back through that introduction by this grown-up. The only person that would never have it would be Ronnie, because we're uncertain about what he has or hasn't done.

"But as soon as the term 'literary' is applied to film, there's this big, ugly word that everyone pulls out of their scabbards, which is pretense. People are dubious of anything they don't think is real, and we're all experts on what's real. Yet elsewhere, there's a long tradition of other types of storytelling.

"Look at the French New Wave, Truffaut, 'Jules and Jim,' and the way that film is framed with narration. Or look at Pedro Almodóvar — you can argue that all his films are melodramas, many of them satirical melodramas, and that's very intoxicating for American audiences. And yet for us here, we like our stories served up nice and neat. The idea of satirical melodrama just confuses the categories."

Along a hard road

THE son of a librarian and a father who worked variously as a truck driver, policeman and welder, Field was born in Pomona, but the family moved to Portland, Ore., when he was 2 months old and his father took a job as a traveling salesman of welding supplies. "I know he would come home and feel like an outsider in his home, and I vowed that I would not be a Willy Loman to my own family," says Field. "Which ultimately I wound up being, because I was an actor and would always be away on shoots."

Seeing the sadness engendered in his father, a frustrated poet, he learned early the value of chasing your dreams, and soon headed for New York.

"I had no agent," he recalls, "so I really had no meaningful way of finding work other than go and dumpster dive for the breakdown [the schedule of auditions and callbacks], fill out my own submissions under fake management companies, go to the studios as a messenger and sneak onto the lot and get myself auditions. And I did: I saw Milos Forman for a film where it was between me and John Cusack; I did the same thing on 'Reservoir Dogs' and it was down to the wire between Tim Roth and me for Mr. Orange. I had a couple of kids at home, I had no money, my wife was selling antiques out of the back of a pickup. I was hustling for work."

His breakout role as an actor came in "Ruby in Paradise," the 1993 Victor Nuñez film that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. For all intents and purposes, this was to be Field's swan song to acting, as he entered the American Film Institute's director's program immediately afterward. But that film's extended life on cable led to roles in "Sleep With Me," "Walking and Talking," "Twister" and, most notably, a phone call from Stanley Kubrick to play pianist Nick Nightingale in "Eyes Wide Shut."

Heeding the call, Field spent eight of the next 15 months in London, where he shot all of four scenes but received a master class in filmmaking from one of the medium's acknowledged masters — an experience he is still loath to talk about in print, lest it rob him of some of the awe he still feels for what transpired there. He credits Kubrick and "Eyes" star Tom Cruise with pushing him to take the plunge into full-time filmmaking, and after Kubrick's sudden death, Field hired the director's longtime amanuensis and aide-de-camp Leon Vitali to run his Santa Monica-based production company, Standard Films.

The truth in the moment

LIKE Kubrick, Field has turned out to be a serious filmmaker, one who trusts the subconscious and is willing to wait if necessary to find the truth in the moment. After "In the Bedroom," he spent more than a year on "Time Between Trains," a biopic of Edwin Booth, the most famous actor of his generation who today is merely a footnote to his brother John Wilkes Booth.

Field claims he lived for months in the Theater Collection at Harvard's Pusey Library and was ultimately unwilling to compromise on the historical detail required to depict five major cities over a 50-year span, which would have put the budget in the $50-million to $80-million range. (DreamWorks halted the project after executive Michael De Luca left the company.) "If something is affecting me in a way I can't turn my back on — well, I'm not that unique, so someone else will be affected in the same way," says Field. "I'm addicted to that, and I trust it, and it's been really good to me."

When pressed, Field cites the attention lavished on his cast as the most gratifying aspect of the honors that have trailed "Little Children" — Winslet, of course, who was honored this month with a career retrospective at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, but comeback story Haley as well, who received the New York Film Critics Circle's best supporting actor award.

"The way something happens can bring a power to the work," says Field. "Here was a guy on his honeymoon in France who got a call that Steve Zaillian and Sean Penn were looking for him [for 'All the King's Men']. I can relate to that, because I got a call from Stanley Kubrick to come to London, and I didn't even have an agent. You can let go of a lot of insecurity in approaching the role in a situation like that. There are generally three parts to the working actor: true talent, enthusiasm and confidence. And a lot of times, it comes down to not trying to convince anyone else, but rather convincing yourself."

Taking stock of his surroundings in the commercial heart of Beverly Hills, a space and sensibility he seems to try to live as far from as is geographically possible, the soft-spoken character actor-turned-burgeoning-auteur is clear about his role in the vast machinery of which he is once again at the perfect epicenter.

"The enormity of this opportunity is mind-blowing, but it is a privilege, and it's not to be squandered. It's serious. Yes, in the end, for a lot of people, it will just be entertainment, something they did one afternoon. But it can't be that for you. You're telling someone a story, and that's the only connection we have to each other — the stories that we tell."

[MacGuffin]

 



It's a romantic comedy?

[Ravi]

It's a romantic comedy?

(No)

[I Love a Magician]

dude is very smooth