Oh Kate...

Little Children(dir. Todd Field)
It was a very visceral experience and I'm still trying to come up with an intrepretation that makes sense of it all. The film's greatest point is that it points out the phoniness not in just some of the character's actions on screen, but also the phoniness that is inherent of cinema. This is most obvious in a couple of scenes especially the whole ending segment and the narrator. The narrator delivers his lines in such a tongue in cheek way and most of his lines are pretty much bold faced lies. He describes Kate Winslet's character as "boyish" in a dry objective tone. Many critics have criticized this point because they most likely find Winslet attractive. I would definately not call her "boyish", but I would also not call her a "knockout." The narrator also describes a football game in the usual dry and objective tone that makes the whole scene seem like a satire of all those movies about football that try to inspire its audience with stories of perserverance(sic?) and hardship. It is easy to poke fun at this scene cuz these men are grown men living in suburbia playing football and taking it alittle too seriously. The narrator's false lines comes heavily in play at the end. You could pretty much say the film explodes in a similar way as a film like Magnolia explodes. The melodrama and emotion is set extremely high. The stories are "resolved." I say "resolved" mainly because you realize that nothing is truly "resolved" especially for Ronnie. How do we know everything is "resolved?" The narrator tells us. The characters' conflicts could not be resolved in such a short amount of time and could possibly never be resolved. The scenes that show the characters acting on their desires are probably the most disturbing in the bunch, but in a sense, liberating except Ronnie's concluding his date by masturbating. You could say the scene is exploitative, but it is easy to see why Field kept it in the film. If that scene was not in the film, his character would seem harmless and misunderstood. The scene where Ronnie goes to the pool for a swim is also a scene pointing out cinema's phoniness. Slant Magazine compares the scene to Jaws, which makes perfect sense. The tension is high during this scene, but why? It is broad daylight and parents are all around the pool. Could Ronnie possibly abduct a child or do something possibly worse? The only scene that rings false and not false in the way that these other scenes do is Kate Winslet's character showing up at Brad's game to root for him and the make-out sesh afterwards. The whole scene seems to undermine Winslet's character's intelligence and just seems absurd. Other than that, this movie is great.
**** out of ****