<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Little Children<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2006)<\/p>\n Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), a bored stay-at-home mom has an affair with Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), while convicted sex-offender Ronnie (Jackie Early Haley) has difficulty adjusting to life outside of prison.<\/p>\n The first hour of Todd Field’s sophomore feature-length film was spellbinding, but once Sarah and Brad gave in to their lust, the movie became a little too conventional, limping towards its inevitable semi-tragic and pointless conclusion.<\/p>\n I loved the character of Sarah at the beginning of the film and would have preferred to hear her sharp inner monologue commentary about the horde of stay-at home mothers she spends her days with rather\u00a0than watch the rest of the film.\u00a0 The energy of this portion of the film reminded me of the first half of Amelie\u00a0<\/em>(2001).<\/p>\n Jennifer Connelly doesn’t do much as Kathy, Brad’s loving but overzealous wife, and while she’s an attractive woman, the repeated assertion Brad would be foolish to leave\u00a0her to be with the less\u00a0attractive Sarah seems ridiculous.<\/p>\n Jackie Early Haley does a\u00a0decent\u00a0job as Ronnie McGorvey, but the film lets him down.\u00a0 I thought it was going to humanize his inability to deal with his predilections.\u00a0 However, when Ronnie takes a blind date to a children’s park and masturbates while looking at\u00a0a swing set, the film loses any chance to humanize him.<\/p>\n The film’s\u00a0depiction of the incremental steps which led to\u00a0Sarah’s husband’s\u00a0obsession with pornography is an\u00a0interesting insight into the process by which\u00a0addiction takes hold.<\/p>\n Todd Field’s first feature-length film In the Bedroom <\/em>(2001)\u00a0was a masterful, quiet, understated movie.\u00a0 Perhaps he was buoyed by success and decided to push himself in his next feature.\u00a0The first hour is excellent, but the film is derailed by its own ambition.\u00a0 Not content to just be a movie; it desperately wants to be a movie with something profound to say.\u00a0He pushed too far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Little Children\u00a0(2006) Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), a bored stay-at-home mom has an affair with Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), while convicted sex-offender Ronnie (Jackie Early Haley) has difficulty adjusting to life outside of prison. The first hour of Todd Field’s sophomore feature-length film was spellbinding, but once Sarah and Brad gave in to their lust,… Continue reading The children are little!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[384,590,616,843],"class_list":["post-873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-progress","tag-jackie-earle-haley","tag-noah-emmerich","tag-patrick-wilson","tag-todd-field","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=873"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14790,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions\/14790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}