Rating: 9/10

Recently I was looking for a good movie to watch.  I was about to order another Atom Egoyan movie on demand when I suddenly remembered that a commenter on this blog named “Mugabe” had repeatedly praised the movie Little Children as the best movie since it’s release in 2006, recently saying:

this movie is not entertainment.

it’s serious.

it’s adult…in the good sense.

too many with children are still children themselves however old they may be in years.

Since I like serious adult movies and was curious to see if someone who claims such a high IQ has good artistic taste, I searched the on demand movies to see if it was available and started watching.

The movie was about a group of suburban stay-at-home moms (and one stay-at-home dad) and the childish ways they behave.  As Mugabe implied, you think the title of the films refers to the children they are raising, but it may refer to the parents themselves.  But in the tradition of American Beauty, it’s also just about the deadness of suburbia.

It’s almost Darwinian in the sense that if life evolved to reproduce, then once we reproduce our lives become meaningless.  They are no longer about ourselves, but about our children.  Almost as if we start dying the moment our children are born.  They replace us.

And so the film is full of parents trying to recapture their youth.  There’s the stay-at-home dad (played by Patrick Wilson) who spends night after night watching teenagers skateboard hoping they will invite him to join, and even starts playing evening football with a bunch of cops because it reminds him of his glory days in high school.  There’s the stay-at-home mom (played by Kate Winslet) who has an affair because it brings excitement back into her life.  There’s the suburban book club, desperate to get younger women to join.

It’s an extremely powerful movie about how we give up our lives for our children.  In one case, literally.