‘Little Children’ a big success

In theaters

LITTLE CHILDREN, directed by Todd Field, written by Field and Tom Perrotta, 137 minutes, rated R. Now playing, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

A good deal of Todd Field’s terrific, satirical new drama, “Little Children,” features adult characters who behave like the very worst sort of children – bullying, aggressive, selfish, judgmental. Yet the way Field exposes them here makes for an insightfully dark, often very funny experience.

The film, which Field (“In the Bedroom”) and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta based on Perrotta’s scathing novel, vilifies suburbia and its inhabitants, kicking each to the curb. The movie doesn’t especially like people, though it also doesn’t sink the nail into humanity’s coffin the way, say, a Todd Solondz movie would.

The film stars Kate Winslet as Sarah Pierce, who is something of an outsider in her cozy Massachusetts hamlet. Unlike the three pious mothers who frequent the same neighborhood playground as Sarah and her daughter, Lucy (Sadie Goldstein), Sarah isn’t conventionally pretty and her parenting skills are on the downside of questionable. While it’s true that her husband is successful, the idea that Sarah failed to achieve her Ph.D. in English keeps her on this particular society’s fringe, which is exactly where Field wants her.

Joining her there is Brad (Patrick Wilson), a stay-at-home dad and aspiring lawyer who twice has failed the bar exam. He has a “knockout” wife in Kathy (Jennifer Connolly), who makes successful PBS documentaries about abused children, yet in spite of having the sort of athletic good looks that win him a nickname “The Prom King” from the three frustrated playground mothers who ogle him, he and Kathy exist in a passionless vacuum. They have no sex life.

Since this also is the case for Sarah, whose husband is enthusiastically addicted to Internet porn, she and Brad naturally are drawn to each other in ways neither can explain. When one of the mothers dares Sarah to “get his phone number,” itself a childish convention, what Sarah and Brad recognize in each other is that wounded part of themselves. A kiss ensues, a heated affair follows, neither without its share of danger, drama or ramifications.

Brad and Sarah are so emotionally adrift and unsure of themselves in their own skin, they tend to parrot the culture surrounding them, if only to give the illusion that they are anchored in this world, which itself is an illusion.

For instance, when the convicted neighborhood pedophile Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley, excellent) decides to take a dip in the local pool to catch a snorkled glimpse of all those swimming children, you sense that Brad and Sarah’s horrified reaction is more a study of horror than real horror. Since they, too, have felt the sting of being ostracized by this hypocritical crowd of shrieking onlookers, they relate with Ronnie on some basic level. They particularly feel for him when he’s hunted down by ex-cop Larry (Noah Emmerich), who harasses Ronnie and his worried, elderly mother (Phyllis Somerville) until the situation implodes, as it must, into deadly self-righteousness.

Throughout, the story is highlighted by Will Lyman’s withering narration, which is a key element to underscoring the film’s dark overtones. While Lyman’s voice hardly is the voice of reason here, it does court a detached bemusement that allows the film to further sharpen its already cutting wit and, more importantly, to turn on every light in this stunted bedroom community.

Grade: A-

On HD DVD

THE BONE COLLECTOR, directed by Phillip Noyce, written Jeremy Iacone, based on the novel by Jeffery Deaver, 118 minutes, rated R.

Now available in high definition on HD DVD is the 1999 thriller “The Bone Collector,” in which bones are collected by a serial killer on the loose in the bowels of New York. The film has a stirring beginning that quickly sags into an uneven pastiche of other thrillers that came before it, including “Silence of the Lambs,” “The Seventh Sign” and particularly David Fincher’s “Se7en.”

But Noyce is no Fincher, a director who wallows in his unseemly atmospheres. Instead, Noyce seems almost repelled by what he has unleashed here. In scene after scene, he holds back, unwilling – or unable – to give audiences what they want: a film that digs and claws and bites its way under their skin.

What’s more maddening about “Collector” is how close it comes to being a good film. Throughout, the film is peppered with stirring scenes immediately followed by corny bits of dialogue, improbable situations, an obvious misunderstanding of police work. Anyone who reads voraciously in the thriller-police genre will groan at the liberties Noyce has taken for dramatic effect.

In the film, Denzel Washington is Lincoln Rhyme, a brilliant, world-renowned forensic detective who was injured in the line of duty. Now a quadriplegic, he has use of “one finger, two shoulders and a brain,” and he’s planning his “final transition.”

But when a serial killer starts his murderous rampage in New York, deliberately leaving obscure clues leading to each of his victims, Rhyme becomes involved, quickly enlisting the help of Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), a model turned police officer who does Rhyme’s legwork – while also, predictably, winning his heart.

Washington and Jolie are good, as is Queen Latifah as Rhyme’s no-nonsense nurse, but far less effective is Michael Rooker as Capt. Howard Cheney. Horribly miscast in a role that demands strength and subtlety, Rooker is a swaggering laughingstock, choosing caricature and cliche over character and credibility. It is he, and the film’s bizarre, out-of-left-field ending, that help to make this film so weak in the marrow.

Grade: C+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and weekends in Television as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.