(and STRANGERS WITH CANDY )
Little Children – Notes on a Scandal – The Good German – Half Nelson – The Pursuit of Happyness – Strangers with Candy
LITTLE CHILDREN
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Noah Emmerich, and Jackie Earle Haley
Directed by Todd Field & written by Field and Tom Perrotta, from his novel
2006
130 R
So MAN am I starting to get burned out on these bloody Oscar movies. Especially stuff up for acting and screenplay. Just talk-talk-talk-talk-talk. It’s almost as bad as television. Just put in something topical, shed and tear or two, don’t put your camera anywhere a machine wouldn’t put it and BAM Oscar nomination! Maybe I’m being cynical, but these are the kind of movies where you wonder if “cinematic” means nothing to the people who make them besides a crane shot at the beginning, some driving between scenes, and a montage late in the second act.
Okay, I am being cynical. There’s probably stuff in the placement of figures in the frame, or whether or not a conversation is done in shot / reverse shot. If a conversation is done entirely with each speaker framed all by himself, it might suggest isolation (or just that’s it’s cheaper, like on TV). If two figures are always in frame, maybe it suggest loyalty. If someone moves right-to-left it means difficulty and awkwardness. But these are hardly the powerful cinematic gestures of, say, Kubrick moving his camera to match the ax attack on the door in “The Shining.”
This is when The Industry tries to get people who don’t usually go to the movies into movie theaters by selling them on “the best” the movies have to offer. But consider – your 16-year-old ka-blammo-oriented genital-waggling hormone-ball who sees a ka-boom movie every Friday night is actually more versed – or at least more recently versed – on the truer, more visual aspects of filmmaking than Joe & Jane Middle-Age Stay-At-Home, who decry movies as noise-festivals promoting either Sex or Violence, depending on their political affiliation (right for the former, left for the latter). This is the same Industry that thought walking-talking junk like “Crash” was the best movie of the year just because they talked about important-sounding stuff. I hate TV. But I digress.
So we begin with Oscar nominations for Actress, Adapted Screenplay, and Original Score: “Little Children” or, as I sometimes think of it, “Not Another Infidelity Movie.” It’s either a well-made movie about people leading tedious, boring lives, or a tedious boring movie. In it, a bored housewife with a squandered education diddles a bored househusband who can never quite pass the bar exam. Oh yes, bash suburbia, we haven’t seen that a million times before. It’s from Todd Field, who blew us away with the stark honesty of “In the Bedroom,” but here he has enlisted the help of the novelist behind “Little Children,” and you get the sense this dude hates the movies, thinks that they’re only valuable when they allude to books, and that The Image is paltry when compared to his brilliant prose.
We know this because he’s kept so much of his prose intact during “Little Children’s” “thank you Captain Obvious” voice-over narration. Still, you almost want to forgive the narration – voiced by the guy who does “Frontline,” no less – because there are a couple of scenes in which it’s priceless. Mostly it’s redundant, providing no insights that we cannot see for ourselves – but there’s a game of suburbanite touch football where the outsized narration actually provides commentary that isn’t on the screen, and then it’s priceless.
And as for obvious, there’s an unforgivable scene in which Winslet goes to a book club to discuss “Madame Bovary” and – lo and behold! – Bovary’s predicament is EXACTLY like Winslet’s, which means not only does she get to talk about classic literature – oooh, this must be a good movie, she’s talking about REAL art! – but she gets to put into words EXACTLY what “Little Children” is about. Fuck you, you book-loving movie-haters, and screw Larry McMurtry’s Oscar-acceptance speech from last year where he went on about nothing but “the culture of books,” never once mentioning movies, as if he only deigned to lower himself to our degenerate art form for the sake of truer art. Asshole. (Sorry, it’s Mardi Gras, and I’ve been drinking.)
Still, Field is a good director, and with the likes of Winslet onboard you know everyone will seem real, and there’s a disastrous quality to the steady progression of events that makes “Little Children” compulsively watchable. No movie in which curve-monster Kate Winslet tosses aside the confines of clothing can be all bad. Over at Ruthless Reviews they make an argument about how the movie is about the perils of shunning responsibility, and how suburban malaise is a result of life going EXACTLY the way you planned it. They don’t sell me on recommending “Little Children” but it makes for interesting reading.
Let’s see how many more times I can capitalize EXACTLY.
More Various & Sundry Oscar Nominees (including “Notes on a Scandal”).