“Little Children” messes with your psyche with surprisingly not-annoying narration

There’s a quality that ranks highly with me when it comes to the cinema: messing with our human psyche.

I’m always up for an existential challenge, something that makes me question my beliefs, a challenge that takes me back and forth between perspectives. This could be due to my overly diplomatic, indecisive yet opinionated and judgmental nature–I respect anything that acknowledges more than one side of any issue.

I have my favorites when it comes to emotion–confusing movies. “Dead Man Walking” will make people who strongly support one side of the death penalty issue wonder if they should reconsider (and make the rest who aren’t sure even more confused and cognizant of the fact that the topic is a severely grey area). “Hable con ella” leaves you feeling dirty and corrupted, but sad and even sympathetic for the male nurse who rapes his comatose patient. “Te doy mis ojos“, leaves you feeling the shame and fear of women abused and pity for the men struggling to understand why it’s wrong and how to stop.

Last night we watched “Little Children“, based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, with Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson, and some phenomenal supporting performances by Jackie Earle Haley and Jane Adams. We sat down to watch it after a disappointing trip to the video store. It’s not a high-end store with a great variety. I wanted to rent “Philadelphia” the other day because after all these years I’ve NEVER seen it, but apparently they only have it on VHS. This was one of those trips where you’re walking around and NOTHING looks appealing to you, but then you realize that you’ve been there for half an hour already and so you can’t just go home empty-handed. I’d been wanting to see “Little Children”, but I thought it was just a depressing drama about infidelity, and I wasn’t sure the mood was right, but I decided to grab it and go home, lest I wither and die there at Family Video and Jake has to come identify my body, frozen in the fetal position in the corner by the drinking fountain with a permanent expression of confusion and disappointment.

I don’t want to give away too much of the movie. There is infidelity, happiness, unhappiness, pedophilia, humor, insight, and tragedy. The way the story unravels takes you from judgment of, to sympathy for, and back to judgment of the characters. Perhaps you realize that they’re not who you thought they were, or that they’re exactly who you thought they were. The most tragic for me is the character of Ronnie, a convicted sexual offender who moves into a well-off neighborhood. My brain kept running back and forth throughout the whole movie from feeling pity for him-he’s aware that he has a problem-and genuine loathing when it becomes apparent how abhorrent he really is.

The ending was happy, sad, confusing and maddening all at once. It ties in nicely with an earlier part in the movie when Sarah, Kate Winslet’s character, takes part in a meeting of the neighborhood ladies’ book club (with the realistic and icky name “Little Sisters”), and displays both her academic and personal insight on Madame Bovary (against a perfectly cast Mary B. McCann as the rich, ignorant and bitchy queen bee of suburbia).

One element I was surprised to love was the narration. I didn’t realize that the movie had been a novel first, but the narration made it evident. I thought it would annoy me or ruin the experience for me, but it was superbly written, and just subtle and sparse enough that it supplemented the actions wonderfully, highlighting neurotic things, insecurities, and behaviors that we all think about and obsess over. I also love that the more I think about the movie, the more I like it, identify with it, and love its characters. The more I look back on it, the more sense it makes.

To get back to my original point, most movies don’t lead you through paths that shed light on the beautiful and the ugly. If they do, they usually come to one of three conclusions: those that you think are beautiful are really ugly and vice versa; there’s really no beauty and everyone is ugly; or no one is ugly and everyone is truly beautiful. It’s rare that you see a movie-or a book-where light is shed simply to show you what people are, without changing them, and leaving you to decide how you feel about it. I once heard of Pedro Almodóvar in a review of his movies (one of which is “Hable con ella”, mentioned above) that he provides a rare look at both sides of characters, or at both the beautiful and the ugly characters, but that he doesn’t ever justify anything. He simply explains. He explains why they are the way they are, whether it’s an acceptable excuse or not, and nothing more. The rest we decide for ourselves. “Little Children” succeeds in doing that just as well. These are the times we see that few things are black-and-white; rather, they are grey, brown, mud, or simply undefinable.