Little Children (2006)

The great Jackie Earl Haley.

I watched this based on Kate Winslet's performance in Roman Polanski's "Carnage". I was flipping through movies On Demand, saw her name and "pornography addiction" in the description and decided to watch it. It ended up being a terrific movie, and really depressing most of the time. Not quite Todd Solondz-depressing, but along those lines.

Sarah (played by Winslet) is a frumpy housewife with a degree in literature who meets Brad (Patrick Wilson) while taking her daughter to the park. The other women at the park were too stuck up to speak to Brad and chose instead to admire him from afar. Sarah's dislike of the other mothers drives her to introduce herself to Brad in an attempt to one-up the others. They hug and kiss as a joke to forever shut up the other mothers, but both of them have a hard time forgetting about each other after that day's kiss.

They meet every day at the city pool, become good friends and find that they're both better parents while spending time together. Brad is a stay at home father, a failed law student who had his youth stolen from him when his parents died. He feels emasculated by his wife's professional success and constant hen-pecking and puts no effort into passing the bar exam. Sarah feels like she's failing as a parent and resents her husband because he works in advertising and makes his living telling lies. On top of this, he has a pornography addiction that prevents him from covering his parenting duties at home. Their shared dissatisfaction of their home life is their common bond and, over time, their friendship evolves into a fling.

All of this takes place in a quiet little town which is the home of a sex offender just released from a two year prison sentence for indecent exposure. The citizens are outraged and Larry (an ex-policeman who plays on Brad's night football league) takes it on his own to create a committee for decency to make everyone aware of who their new neighbor is. Ronnie (played by the great Jackie Earl Haley) moves back into his elderly mother's home and is constantly under attack with flyers baring his face hung everywhere, his house spray painted, late night drive-by's with megaphones warning the neighbors of his presence and even knocking on his door trying to coax him outside to fight - all at the hands of a drunken ex-cop who, too, is a failure in his own life. The movie's most tense scenes are with Brad and Larry, and the end result of Larry's merciless tormenting is too good to give away here.

So who's more detestable? The creepy sex offender doing his best to be good and keep to himself, or the selfish, adulterous "normals" who throw away their lives for another chance at happiness at the expense of their families? Every single person in this movie is unhappy, and all instances of joy are fleeting and at someone else's expense. Damaged characters make for great movies, though, and this was no exception. There was a sinking, hopeless feeling in my stomach for most of this film and I haven't been able to push it out of my mind since it finished. There was a little bit of an Robert Altman-like quality to the film in the way the characters' lives intertwined, but not in an annoying or forced way like in "Crash". There wasn't a bad performance in the entire film. Kate Winslet was especially good and Jackie Earl Haley was brilliant in his first film in 13 years. It would be unfair to give this anything less than a perfect rating as it's heaps better than the movies I've given 4 star ratings. It's the best movie I've seen in a long while.

5/5