After considerable critical acclaim and many post-season awards for In the Bedroom in 2001, it took him five years for director Todd Fields to develop his follow-up project, and he picked a tough nut to crack. The eponymous source novel for Little Children is a complex story about suburban angst, an ambitious literary effort which walks a fine line between condescending toward its characters and compelling us to get involved with their lives. As one Amazon reviewer noted, "Most of the individuals in this novel are hypocritical, selfish, and immature. Nevertheless, Perrotta is such a gifted writer that he humanizes the characters and makes us care deeply about them. The author implies that even when we grow up and become parents ourselves, in some ways we all remain ''little children' inside." The novel is filled with intricate references and allusions to other works of literature. Sarah's book club is discussing Madame Bovary, and the parallels between Emma Bovary's life and Sarah's own are readily apparent. The work also uses some of the relationships between characters to reflect upon others. For example, the interactions of the suburban adults are pictured as grotesque mirrors of the interactions of their children.

You just know that all of that isn't going to be easy to translate to film.

Sarah (Kate Winslet) is an unfulfilled suburban housewife who is married to a dipstick of a marketing consultant and internet porn addict. She still seems to define herself in terms of her failed Ph.D. in English Literature, but is condemned to an everyday life of drudgery and motherhood to a three year old. Todd (Patrick Wilson) is an unfulfilled househusband who depends on his wife to support them because he can't seem to pass the bar exam. He still seems to define himself in terms of the star quarterback he once was, but is condemned to a life of everyday drudgery as sole caregiver to a three year old. It isn't long before Todd and Sarah realize that they are basically the same person with different genital organs, and not much longer before they start rubbing aforesaid genitals together, using their fleeting moments of passion to recapture the adolescence they miss. A major sub-plot involves their neighborhood's local child molester, who has recently been released from prison, and a disgraced former cop who harasses and bullies the pervert and his mother. The two stories intersect at various times, but the moments of intersection are not outrageous stretches of our credibility, and are not even particularly critical to the development of either story, so the film is basically structured as two stories which unfold in parallel in the same neighborhood.

In order to keep the story as faithful as possible to its literary roots, the film uses a PBS announcer to recite some eloquent prose from the novel. I'm sure you realize that such a device rarely works. Words which seem eloquent and stirring on paper often seem pompous, and insincerely rhetorical when spoken aloud in a conversational context. I cringed when I heard the announcer speechifying at the film's outset, and there were other moments when I thought the technique seemed artificial, but on balance I give the authors credit for keeping the narrator's presence low-key and unobtrusive enough that it accentuated the tone they were trying to maintain.

The script had to make some hard choices about how to treat the novel's tone shifts between romantic drama and black comedy. Fields and the novelist worked together to tell the stories as seriously as possible, trying to prevent the main characters from being comic devices by making them real. It would be possible to make both the child molester and the disgraced cop into cartoon characters, for example, but the film wisely avoids this. 

The decisions that they made worked in the sense that the film does bring the viewer into the lives of its characters, and develops all the major ones in multiple dimensions. The humor is there, but it is basically buried deep inside the absurdity of the situations, and the script concentrates the scathing condescension on a few minor characters, like Sarah's husband.  Unfortunately, all the decisions which maintained the integrity of the project also made the film much too aloof and high-falutin' to have any significant box office appeal, and the film's financial path walked along the same rickety bridge as other similarly worthy literary adaptations like The Door in the Floor. The market for this type of film is not a large one. Little Children maxed out at two million dollars in 30-40 theaters. If it is any consolation to the co-authors, the general critical consensus was that the film was a significant artistic triumph.