| Overall Grade: |
C |
|
| Story: |
B |
|
|
| Acting: |
B- |
|
|
| Direction: |
C |
|
|
| Visuals: |
C |
|
|
Kinder, Kuche Und Suburbia
by Renato (movies profile)
Dec 24, 2007
29
of
38 people found this review helpful
Unlike many reviewers, I thought the voice-over by Frontline veteran, Will Lyman, was a stroke of whimsical genius. That's where my positives end.
Perhaps it's too much to ask Todd Field to carry over the incisive sophistication from In the Bedroom (2001), but Little Children felt like a step backwards in terms of dictorial maturation.
The plotlines here do not intertwine so much as bump into each other, giving it a rather cold, dispirited tone.
There's more than a touch of Lysol in this film -- it's antiseptic for what it attempts.
Suburbia tends to be pilloried by Hollywood, whenever possible.
There, melodrama becomes stale, self-important emotion; comedy tends towards the mean-spirited and cabalistic, whilst grand romance is nothing more than a few sordid romps, covered up by much hysterical, pseudo-religious posturing towards the end.
If you note, Hollywood films portray suburbia as either a study in the repressed doldrums (Ordinary People), or in dysfunctional WASP emotion (American Beauty), or as in Little Children, a garden of passive evil, where adults live protected lives from everyone, including the randomness of life itself.
Into this little cocoon of repression, comes a convicted would-be paedophile, locked up for exposing himself to minors, who moves into his mother's home, and thereto into the neighbourhood which is thrown into a tizzy of action committee meetings -- led by a maniacal, disgraced ex-copper, intent on perhaps reestablishing his reputation by his ad-hoc vigilantism, if only to himself.
It is that voice-over narration, which is a rather ham-handed way by Field to give this film a touch of documentary remove, that Voice of an All-Knowing God, that ultimately saves this decentralised picture, from the chaos of its ambition.
You find yourself actually looking forward to the sardonic, matter-of-fact, bass voice describing the inner workings of the character's emotions, a dry, unamused Paul Winfield who is your cicerone throughout.
The actors themselves are prevented as either part of this cinematic device, or their own character's limitations, from doing so.
Yet, I found Patrick Wilson's "Prom King" character to be much richer than the rest, in terms of development: and certainly more than his lover, Kate Winslet.
He stands for a kind of fantasy for the women of the neighbourhood, who idealise his life via his All-American, athletic good looks and caring for his son, and who are repelled to find out the truth -- no Prom King he, but rather a twice-failed Bar Exam taker, one further step towards emasculation, which his successful PBS documentarist wife never lets him forget, even if in silent disdain.
That Kate Winslet is attracted to the Prom King is not unusual, but of course, the idea here is that the two neighbourhood misfits would naturally be attracted to each other -- two odd men out, each lost in the desolation of their own marriages and existences.
For this film to work, you need more sympathetic leads and more directorial firmness in corralling the bisecting plotlines.
Otherwise, irony (the PBS documentary angle) or exposé (the hypocritical Victorianism of suburbia) becomes a little too forced, a little too pat, a little too uninvolving.
Shame, I had high hopes for this film.
Ultimately, this further story of ordinary people is just plain ordinary. |
My Public Profile 
