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Little Children (4.5/5)

Writer/director Todd Field follows up his Academy Award nominated 2001 film In the Bedroom with a much more accessible entry. Little Children is magnetic, a movie that manages to be artistic and entertaining all at once. It’s part drama, part satire, and determined to have an impact.

The film strikes an incredibly strange balance between the serious and the surreal, by taking the familiar and by now cinematically worn out subject of parents in unhappy marriages and marrying it with a wry narration played is if it were lifted from an episode of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”. The narrator serves as a warm and sometimes funny guide through the lives of Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) and Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), two stay-at-home parents locked into an empty and unsatisfying routine of childcare in a haunting, tree-lined suburbia while their spouses live more interesting lives out in the work force.

We meet Sarah in a park where she sits apart from the other nattering, empty-headed mothers and tells herself that she’s not one of them. Little Children’s view of full-time child-rearing is a bleak one. For an ambitious and intelligent woman it’s almost a death sentence, or at the very least a big give-up. Sarah loves her daughter, but she also loved having a life. Now her life is her daughter and whoever or whatever Sarah once was is gone, replaced by the word “mother”. The real Sarah, long dead and buried by a pregnancy, is reawakened when she meets Brad.

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The Departed (4/5)

After a brief dalliance with aviation and Bob Dylan, super-director Martin Scorsese has returned to his first love: organized crime. This time it’s the Irish that are up to no good in The Departed, his remake of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs.

Starring Matt Damon as Colin, a stiff Massachusetts State Trooper with a hidden agenda. He’s a mole, working for Boston’s top gangster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Colin’s a worker and he rises through the State Police ranks rapidly, tipping off Costello at every stop along the way. But there’s a problem. He’s not the only rat in the picture. The Trooper’s have their own mole, an undercover officer working deep inside Costello’s organization. His name is Billy Costigan, and he’s played with vicious desperation by Marty’s favorite son Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not long before everyone figures out they’ve been compromised, and the shit hits the fan as both rats on either side of the law scramble to find and take out each other.

At the center of everything is Nicholson’s Costello; a magnetic, hands-on mob boss with a gift for dispensing neighborhood wisdom and brain-smashing bullets with equal exuberance. It’s Costello who sets the tone of the film when he asks a younger version of Colin to identify the difference between cops and criminals. Costello’s answer is simply this: “When you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?” Maybe there is no difference, but The Departed goes looking for one anyway.

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