Little Children (***1/4)

? A young mother, Sarah felt something missing from her life. She would sometimes chat with the trio of fellow suburban housewives that gathered daily in a nearby playground, but did not think herself one of them. She couldn’t quite adopt their child-centered worldview, did not, for example, agree that the local sex offender, who after all had only exposed himself, ought to actually be castrated. But when she met Brad, another young parent, both of them felt a connection, the presence of something missing from their current relationships. So it is in Todd Field’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel, which stars Kate Winslet as Sarah, Patrick Wilson as Brad, and Jennifer Connelly as Brad’s wife.

+  The movie features a number of passages from the novel read in a voice that sounds like one of those book-on-tape guys. The effect is somewhere between arch humor and deliberate distance. The narrator’s disconcerting, yet I missed him when he went away. Field and his actors also more subtly convey a lot about these people’s lives and motivations. Winslet’s Sarah is definitely the most fleshed out, and the actress gives another great performance. While this is no action thriller, the pacing is quicker than in Field’s previous effort, In the Bedroom.

- Even if In the Bedroom was slow, it moved inexorably to a simple but satisfying ending that both fit the story and the characters. The ending here has too much timed to happen at once and isn’t as convincing. A smaller problem is that you can tell this was adapted from a novel. Nothing seems missing, exactly, but you feel like there ought to have been more to a few characters, particularly to Sarah’s husband, who’s a little more rounded out in the novel (which Perrotta adapted with Field).

= ***1/4 This isn’t going to be a movie for everyone. It’s unsettling, particularly with the voice-over, and it takes a detached view of its morally ambiguous characters. I think a lot of people will come out of the movie trying to figure out what it was trying to say, and why a sex offender plot was mixed into a story about potential adultery. On the other hand, the same odd mixture kept me watching to see where everything was going.

IMDb link