Little Children is hailed this new year as a trenchant criticism of everyday life in a Massachusetts suburb.  As a critic who lives his everyday life in a California suburb, I was allured by the possibilities of a comparison.

The film gives us a suburb in which all of the adults act out their desires for the passion of youth.  An omniscient narrator (documentary-style!) takes us through our central characters:  the PhD drop-out in English literature dreaming of Madame Bovary’s sexually-liberating alternative to mind-numbing housewifing; the househusband who’d just rather be one of the high school skater’s rail-sliding down the stair banister of the local high school; the ex-cop out of work because he has shot a 13 year old boy with a toy gun.  He hopes to exonerate this mistake by volunteering  to protect his community through vindictive acts waged against their newest neighbor:  a convicted pedaphile (amazingly played by Jackie Earle Haley–whom you might remember as the motorcycle punk "Kelly" in the Bad News Bears!). 

These character’s lives are tightly pulled together in the end, all of their delicate dreams crushed to pieces, and any lasting criticism of the suburban environment and way of life is ultimately forsaken by our omniscient narrator’s reminder that, ‘if today’s bad, there’s always tomorrow.’  With this you realize the director didnt understand, or care to believe, the horror behind his own movie.

As our West coast suburban representation we might suggest Magnolia.  But it’s much more relevant to remind Little Children’s audience and director of Scott Peterson, whom you might remember on Christmas Eve 2003 directed a fiction of his own, sending the police, media, and the neighbors out looking for his pregnant wife.  In April the next year, her torso and fetus separately washed ashore on the San Francisco Bay.  When arrested on the lam in La Jolla, Scott Peterson had a gun, four cell phones, $15,000 cash, a bottle of Viagra, and dyed his hair and new goatee blonde.  The motive remains unclear; but his affair with Amber Frey and a desire to return to a bachelor lifestyle seem to be the relevant indicators.

Peterson transforms Little Children into Peter Pan.  To film the American suburbs and conclude that they are places that leave us unhealthy, unhappy, and misunderstood is somehow what we call a trenchant criticism today.  Instead of calling it a lost opportunity to say something meaningful about the end of an American ideal if, indeed, that’s what the suburb ever was.