Little Children

Based on Tom Perrotta’s book, Little Children follows Kate Winslet’s Sarah and Patrick Wilson’s Brad as they embark on an extramarital affair that’s eventually complicated by various outside forces. Filmmaker Todd Field, armed with his and Perrotta’s screenplay, delivers a slow-moving yet mostly engrossing drama that gets off to a thoroughly captivating start, as the movie boasts a mesmerizing opening stretch, complete with novel-like narration, that certainly proves effective at establishing the various central characters and small town in which they reside – with the promising, incredibly compelling atmosphere heightened by the superb efforts of a uniformly first-class cast. (In addition to Winslet and Wilson’s top-notch work here, Field has elicited stellar performances from talented periphery players like Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Connelly, and Noah Emmerich.) From there, Little Children segues into an engaging (albeit somewhat conventional) midsection that’s focused almost entirely on the protagonists’ aforementioned extramarital affair – which ultimately does, when coupled with a slightly overlong running time, diminish the picture’s overall impact. By the time the note-perfect climactic stretch rolls around, however, Little Children‘s minor missteps have essentially been rendered moot and the movie is, in the final analysis, a superb followup to Field’s terrific debut, In the Bedroom.

***1/2 out of ****

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