"Little Children" - Another Powerful Adult Drama

"Little Children," a powerful drama, has been quietly playing in a select amount of theaters since mid-October. Despite mostly terrific and well-deserved reviews, the film has garnered little attention until it was recently nominated for a few Golden Globe Awards including Best Picture - Drama. Hopefully the nominations will kick start this movie into a wider distribution as it is one of the best films of 2006 and should be seen.

The film tells several stories involving the citizens of a town where everyone seems to either know everyone else or, they know someone who knows someone. When a man once convicted of exposing himself to a child returns to live with his mother, the town is inundated with posters of the man with the cautionary heading, "Are your children safe?" Each of these stories seem unrelated but all beautifully converge on one another thanks to a tightly written screenplay by Todd Field (who also directed) and Tom Perrotta (on whose novel this film is based).

Kate Winslet (Golden Globe nominee) plays Sarah, a housewife and mother with a fairly mundane life. She lives in a home that was inherited through her husband's family and looks most forward to her nightly walk with a girlfriend. Most days she spends at the park with her daughter and three other women who happen to know a little something about everything. She has a husband who much prefers looking at Internet pornography then at her - but that seems to be okay with her. She seems to be a satisfactory mother but isn't above leaving her daughter with a babysitter for a weekend tryst or taking her eyes off the child long enough not to be able to locate her.