Movie Review- Little Children

I first heard about Little Children on the blog of the awesome Dr. Monkerstein, who did his own review and highly recommended it. The website for New Line Cinema describe Little Children thusly,

Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Tom Perrotta, Little Children follows the family life of young, unfulfilled suburbanites, Sarah (Winslet) and Brad (Wilson), whose relatively mundane and protected lives intersect on the playgrounds, town pools and streets of their small community. When a brief encounter at a neighborhood park leads them down a fateful path, their lives, and the lives of their children, take a surprising and potentially perilous turn.

This is a great description of the film and hence why I used it, but what is missing is that these two along with several of the other characters in the film demonstrate the way in which so many people are stuck in adolescence. So many of us are still trying to accomplish dreams and hopes that we have been living with for many years and so even as adults we are still not yet truly mature adults. The characters are all very convincing with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson showing how mundane life is and how we all have bigger dreams that seem to disappear as we get older and have children and settle down into married life. Jennifer Connelly is also very good as the driven, ambitious wife of Wilson. We see life as it really seems to exist, life goes on even as there are things out of the ordinary occurring around the characters with much of this based on new feelings and thoughts that each has about their own life.

I found myself comparing this to many of the Todd Sodonz films that I have seen and really liked. Little Children again reflects life closer to how it is in the real world and not how it is shown in Hollywood. We are all struggling to figure out our lives and how to transcend from adolescence to adulthood even after we are already in adulthood. I also really liked the narrator who is with us through the entire movie, he provides additional information and connects the film to the book or so it seems as I have not yet read the book, but now plan to read it. So I echo Dr. Monkerstein recommendations and also think that you should see this film.