Little Children - 2006

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Little Children is a 2006 American drama film directed by Todd Field. It is based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, who along with Field wrote the screenplay. It stars Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Jackie Earle Haley, Noah Emmerich, Gregg Edelman, Phyllis Somerville and Will Lyman. The original music score is composed by Thomas Newman. The film premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is a reluctant housewife and mother in an upper-middle class suburb of Boston. She is married to Richard Pierce (Gregg Edelman), a successful yet distant husband, who is secretly obsessed with an internet porn star. Sarah refers to her daughter Lucy as an "unknowable little person" and feels out of place around the other mothers at a local playground.

Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson) is a former college football player who's married to Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a documentary filmmaker, with a young son named Aaron. Brad is depressed and frustrated, as his wife is the breadwinner and he is a stay-at-home father who has failed the bar exam twice. Each day he leaves home with the pretense of going to the library to study, but spends the time watching skateboarders at the nearby park. He joins a policeman's touch football team at the urging of a friend, Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), a disgraced former police officer.

The Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano said "Little Children is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind — a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring — the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core."

The Reception - 2005

Here is an independent film that crossed my mind the other day. I saw in 2005 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. I think I recall it because it was such a uniquely, well-acted drama that threw me for a loop with some intense plot twists that I didn't expect. It's worth seeing. I'm sure it's nothing you've ever seen before.

It is a drama set in wintry upstate New York. Hoping to cash in on an inheritance, Sierra (Margaret Burkwit) and her husband Andrew (Darien Sills-Evans) arrive at her mother's Jeannette's home only to discover resentful Jeannette (played by Pamela Holden Stewart) and her companion, the African-American artist Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims). I don't want to give up anymore than that...but it's an intelligent drama with great characters. The characters sometimes ask each other questions they should already know the answers to.

It only cost $5000 to do this film in "8" days. It just goes to show you that a great film can be made with a minimum amount of money if you have a good story.