Little Children

I had expected more enthusiasm for this film than I have. What compromises my appreciation of it is the way it uses a narrator: didactic and, in its ending, self-congratulatory moralizing. I like the story here a lot, the screwed up characters and their screwed up lives, but the narration puts everything in a context that stretches to be self-important, at least to my sensibility. Not nearly as good as In the Bedroom by the same director.

Monster's Ball is a film that presents a similar ending with more dramatic power than a narrator telling us what we should think about all this. In both cases, we see screwed up people trying once again to put their lives back together: and the "message" is, we can't change the past but we can change the future, and we can begin doing this at any time. A glimmer of hope. In Living Children, we get the short sermon of this. In Monster's Ball, we have our central couple on the back porch at night, eating ice cream. She has just discovered a secret about him, which has the potential of ruining their beginning relationship. Very long silences here, which increases the tension because we know what she knows but he doesn't. Finally he says, I think we'll be all right. And she nods. We feel the tension, the difficulty ahead -- but we're on their side, we want them to make it. When we are told to hope, rather than feeling it, the experience is too cerebral.

I'd almost give LC a thumbs down but too much about it is very good.