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NEWLINE / AP |
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LITTLE CHILDREN
Leafy, languid suburbia. Reading circles, summer days at the municipal pool, desperate housewives and, in this case, a desperate househusband. You expect another tale of mildly amusing, mildly moralistic middle class adultery. But director (and co-writer) Todd Field boldly raises a tired genre's stakes. A child molester (Jackie Earle Haley) resides in the neighborhood, and you don't know whether to fear him or feel for him (hint: both turn out to be appropriate). Nor do you know quite what to make of the lead adulterers (Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson), getting it on while their children nap upstairs. He's a little too lazy and careless to enlist our full sympathy; she thinks she may be just a little to smart for her environment, although maybe she isn't. The result is a curiously savage film, melodramatically transforming what might have been no more than a weary cliché.
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