With his newest feature Little Children, director Todd Field — who moved audiences with his 2005 film In The Bedroom (starring Charlottesville’s own Stacey Spacek) — returns with a provocative examination of modern suburban life, marriage, fidelity, and the loneliness of secret dreams. Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly and Patrick Wilson star in this multi-layered romantic satire co-written by Field and Tom Perrotta from Perrota’s acclaimed novel of the same name.
In East Wyndam, Massachusetts, the enviable lives of young married couples intersect in the playgrounds, community pools, and streets of their small town in hidden and potentially dangerous ways. Sarah (Winslet) has a PhD in English literature and is still coming to terms with living in the suburbs and raising children. She hangs out with, but does not connect to, the other suburban moms (women who can declare a spa treatment “an intense spiritual experience”) and views her shallow neighbors as sociological specimens instead of peers.
Those moms, in turn, are more interested in Brad (Wilson), a stay-at-home dad and former athlete whom they refer to as “the Prom King”. Brad, married to Kathy (Connelly), a striking PBS documentary filmmaker, is unenthusiastically anticipating taking the bar exam for the third time. Partly out of intrigue, and partly just to shake up her neighborhood, Sarah begins a flirtation with Brad that unexpectedly leads to steamy sexual trysts during their children’s “nap time”.
The genuine peccadilloes happening in their neighborhood remain largely unnoticed by the community members more focused on the imagined deeds of a sexual predator who has been released from prison and now lives nearby with his mother. As the story unravels, so do the lives of these reckless characters, only to slowly intertwine again. Even Brad’s wife finds herself in a book club with Sarah, her husband’s secret lover, who feels compelled to defend the title character of Madame Bovary.
Strong performances from all the actors, crisp cinematography, and sure-handed direction create an involving and eccentric tale. Little Children is an intriguing study of morality, small town paranoia, and the hunger for passion and meaning in uncontrolled lives.
Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman maintains one of Hollywood’s most prolific careers, coupling integrity with elegance. Freeman enjoys a level of respect and admiration within the entertainment industry for his talent, business acumen and integrity. His work has transcended type and redefined variety, with roles ranging from the pimp Fast Black in Street Smart, Sergeant Major John Rawlins in Glory, to a celestial being in Bruce Almighty. One of the most sought after talents in the entertainment industry, Morgan is a four-time Academy Award nominee for his roles in Street Smart (Best Supporting Actor), Driving Miss Daisy (Best Actor), The Shawshank Redemption (Best Actor) and most recently winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Million Dollar Baby. Diversified and passionate, he also directed the 1993 film of Bopha!, hailed by Variety as “a film of tremendous emotional power and integrity.”
Paul Wagner, Charlottesville’s first and only Emmy- and Oscar-winning documentary film director, still gives serious meaning to the self-styled guerrilla filmmaker. In 1996, he led a small film crew into Tibet and secretly filmed scenes with a digital video camera in order to produce Windhorse, a gritty and evocative film about the horrors Tibetans still face today.
After a year at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, Liev Schreiber embarked on his professional career at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. The tall (6′2″), brooding actor with the youthful face and resonant voice originally wanted to be a writer, but was drawn to performing. In the early nineties, he first drew critical acclaim with parts in both On- and Off-Broadway productions. By the middle of that decade, he had moved to film, drawing notice for quirky and colorful characters that combined both menace and compassion such as the British bouncer with a thing for a librarian in the genial comedy Party Girl (1994), a drag queen seeking assistance on Christmas Eve from a suicide prevention center in Nora Ephron’s Mixed Nuts, or the semi-agoraphobic iconoclast looking for a way to meet girls in Denise Calls Up (1995).