Infidelity Week: Little Children (2006)

1 year ago

Infidelity Week: Little Children (2006)

I’M NOT A NICE PERSON

by Anaïs Escobar

I was fourteen when my parents got divorced. It was as simple as my mom cheating on my dad with the cardiologist down the cul-de-sac and everything falling apart. The facts are always neat when it comes to infidelity but the reasons behind it are always nebulous, or at the very least, misunderstood. At that age, I promised myself I would never hurt someone the way I had seen, that I would think of others before myself. Nine years and quite a few boyfriends later, I can see that things don’t always turn out the way you hope.

Little Children is Todd Field’s second film after the masterful In The Bedroom, and it is a moody reflection on secret and not-so-secret suburban angst. Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson, for once not boring me to tears) are stay-at-home parents who meet in the park, where the mothers refer to him as the Prom King. She is a bored former academic with a little girl who won’t ride in a stroller and he is this suburb’s John-John as he has graduated from law school but cannot pass the bar exam. They kiss to provoke the cabal of mothers at the park and find it is the highlight of their recent lives. Neither has much else: Sarah, a husband obsessed with a woman on the internet named Slutty Kay, and Brad, an intimidatingly together and beautiful wife who would rather watch their little boy sleep than have sex with her husband. Over several long afternoons at the community pool, they grow closer not in any real common interest but in loneliness and this new shared secret of theirs.

While Brad and Sarah begin their affair, the rest of the community focuses on a sex offender amongst them. Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) has just been released from prison after serving time for indecent exposure to a minor and is now living with his mother. He tells her that he simply doesn’t desire women his own age but she sets him up on a date anyways; he ends up masturbating in his date’s car near a playground. A former cop named Larry (Noah Emmerich) launches a hate campaign against Ronnie and harasses him and his mother regularly. Ronnie is a pariah, loved only by his mother, and shunned by the rest of the community.

There is something about a secret life that is appealing to us. We don’t have to answer for it and thus, we can keep it alive with justifications. I cheated on an ex-boyfriend when I was younger. I had sworn up and down that I would never do this but it happened; I’m not proud of it. It’s easier than you think. I would like to think it’s because of someone else that you make these choices but it’s always for yourself. It’s when you start to think of other people, your boyfriend, the other person’s girlfriend, in some cases, children, that the guilt sets in. Some would say that in a perfect world, they would never find out and no one would get hurt, but then you wouldn’t be feeling much, would you?

I often think about infidelity and the infinite gray area it fills. Some consider looking at pornography or even thinking about another person sexually a betrayal. Others think there is a line that must be crossed for something to constitute infidelity, an action, a kiss, sex. Little Children is full of unfaithful people to varying degrees. Everyone had a fantasy life from the moms at the park ogling the Prom King to Sarah’s husband whacking it at the office to Slutty Kay while wearing her thong on his face; again, where’s the line, what’s the difference? Is something wrong if no one finds out? I think it depends on who you ask.

There’s a scene in Little Children where Ronnie goes to the town pool to swim and every single person pulls their kid out of the water, understandably. No one will get in with him in there and he leaves angrily, marked by his previous crimes and the truth of who he is. Earlier in the film during a discussion about Ronnie, one of the park moms laughs as she recalls how her brother used to expose himself to her and others when he was younger; she wonders if it’s any different. Another woman says, “That’s different, he wasn’t doing it to strangers.” The divide between public and private is vast, and it is not so much what we reveal as to who. The community knows little about the extent of Brad and Sarah’s affair or about Sarah’s husband’s one-sided affair with Slutty Kay, or any number of things unknown about their neighbors. What they do know is that some things cannot survive once they are brought into the light of day.

Unable to live publicly and grief-stricken by his mother’s death, Ronnie castrates himself. Sarah and Brad attempt to leave their lives to be together only to have the universe quite literally pull them back to their realities. It’s easy to have a secret, sometimes it’s even fun, until reality starts to creep into it and then the secret seeps into your real life. That’s when people get hurt, that’s when you have to make choices. It’s not even that one choice is right while the other is wrong but that eventually you have to find a way to sleep at night. I’m selfish but I’m too much of a guilty person to be unfaithful anymore. I wouldn’t want to in my relationship now because I choose reality and all that comes with it. When things get hard, I never let myself lose sight of reality, the good things I’ve chosen.

I only allow myself to wonder.

Anaïs Escobar is a writer working on a billion projects at once. She’s mostly an okay girlfriend. She most recently wrote for quotabl.es and blogs at You’ve Escaped.