The key to understanding this film is found in the title. Much like L’Enfant, the titular “little children” are the adults rather than their kids. When they discuss blowing off tests, anxiety over “tonight’s game,” and running away together, it’s as though we’re viewing a postgraduate episode of Friday Night Lights rather than a film about adultery and sexual perversion. Add to that the collection of gossiping women who stare and giggle childishly at “the Prom King” (note the high-school prominence of that title), and the film becomes an allegory of adolescence.
This aspect is only strengthened by the now infamous narrator, who delivers much of the plot in a deep, monotonous, and all-pervasive voice. The academic way in which this nameless, faceless man summarizes emotions, hopes, and stinging regrets mocks the very characters before us. He derides them for their ways, their self-important lives, their sad little escapades thought so brilliant. It adds an air of absurdity to the film, apparent especially during the football game, when everything comes together so idealistically, as though it were perfectly choreographed.
Hence, I was not only pleasantly surprised by this film, but I also liked it. Expecting to abhor the spoon-feeding narrator, whose voice sounds so familiar yet so distant, I instead embraced him as an all-knowing friend, a presence in the theatre air allowing me to laugh at the husbands and wives before me rather than pity them for their selfish problems. Jackie Earle Haley’s Ronnie McGorvey may be the film’s villain—and what an incredibly deep and terrifying villain he is—but Sarah, Brad, and all their friends are Field and Perrotta’s true subjects of scorn and ridicule.
by Adam Balz | Source: New Line 35MM Theatrical Print
15 Jan 2007 2:40 PM | Submit Comment
