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Playing with Children

Portland Native Todd Field Tackles Shame and Judgment in Suburbia

I sat down with the plain-spoken writer/director at Seattle’s opulent Fairmont Olympic Hotel on the morning of his latest creation’s local debut, and by the time was all said and done it struck me I could have sat there with him for an entire day and still not gotten tired of debating with him. Field’s adaptation of Tom Perrota’s best seller is a stirring, sometimes jarring descent into the lives a disparate group of suburbanites dealing with their own everyday insecurities and indiscretions, and as cold as the picture can be it is still a film impossible to not be moved in at least some way by.

But what was it that drew the Oscar-nominated filmmaker to the story? “I probably have a better understanding of that now than I did at the time we started,” comments Field, “but the thing that struck me about Tom’s book was that it felt like it reflected back the state of anxiety I was feeling in our country [in 2003]. It felt a little bit like Our Town, but instead it felt like ‘Our Country.’ Tom’s narrative felt like what would have happened had the stage manager [in Our Town] grew up and knew a thing or two outside of that play.”

“[Tom] does this very interesting thing, I think, and not just tonally (although tonally that book did just completely devastate me). I mean, I didn’t know anything about it and I had never read Tom before. The satire was very sharp. Very funny. And I made this assumption that this was going to be the entire novel, and then about halfway through it wasn’t like that anymore. Something else started to happen. By the end of it I had to set it down and catch my breath.”

Director Todd Field on the set of "Little Children"

“I had such a strong reaction to the book that it completely surprised me. The things he deals with in [it]are, again, braided like this satire and this melodrama which is [both] this idea of identity and of judgment. Judgment of ourselves, of judging other people, ghettoizing other people based upon first impression and upon their appearance, or hearsay, or gossip, all the ugliness of surface humane condition coupled with the opposite which is matriarchy. Understanding. Encouragement. Love. Giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt. Trying to walk in another’s shoes.”

But should these two themes coexist side-by-side? “Definitely,” states the director. “They are complete opposites but of course they should be presented side-by-side. Those are the extremes of drama, which are comedy and tragedy, and those are the extremes of the human condition, which are love/compassion and absolute condemnation.”

Still, just because those themes proved to be interesting to Field, that didn’t mean he was ready to jump right into the project. “I wasn’t sure I was convinced I could make it into a film,” the filmmaker asserts emphatically. “I had to read [the book] about a half dozen times before I couldn’t ignore it any longer. By then it just seemed obvious.”

The thing is, whereas in a novel it can be a bit easier to morph form satirical comedy to outright tragedy-tinged melodrama, in a film this shift can seem jarring and uncomfortable. Not so in Little Children, the change in tone an integral piece of the motion picture’s uncomforting success. “It happens about an hour in,” explains Field, “right when Ronald James McGorvey enters, really for the first time. [At this point] there has been a lot of discussion about him by the other characters and by the community, but it has all been secondhand and hearsay. We’ve seen the propaganda all over the town and we’ve probably begun to form an impression about this character even though we have never met him.”

“As soon as Ronnie enters the film the narrator – who has introduced us to every character up until now – takes a huge step back behind the curtain and [the viewer] is not allowed the comfort of the narrator telling them what this man is thinking. You have to make your own impressions [of him] and to process those by yourself, and you have a predisposition based on what you’ve already heard about this man which influences those thoughts. So the narration disappears for a good thirty minutes leaving [Ronnie] out there alone in the story. That is the point where the tone of the film begins to shift towards the other extreme.”

The narration add a decidedly unsettling mixture to the film, one that Field readily admits to being the case and one he wanted to make sure was present. For some viewers, watching Little Children can almost be a clinical exercise, the unseen voice of the narrator turning the film into an almost anthropological documentary on trying to live within the human condition. “It is, but these are also characters in a period of our history where people are so self aware that they cast themselves in all kinds of situations.”

“Listen,” he continues, “when you are a child you tend to think that the rest of the world is fake and that you are the only real person living inside of it. Everyone else are really the ‘extras’ of your life, which is a really immature, early impression that you have as a child. But then you realize [as you get older] that this isn’t the case. That the world is made up of more than just you.”

“These characters, however, are different. When we first meet Sarah we see her with these three women on a park bench and we don’t get to hear the entire conversation of any of them. What they are saying is very catty and damning and petty, but they come in short, staccato bursts, and insomuch that you have a blonde, a brunette and a redhead in an extreme way they are stereotypes, but they are stereotyped by [Sarah]. It is when we turn around on her, when we hear that first line, that we realize we have been introduced to these three women but that we have been introduced to them and to what they are saying through her ears and through her eyes.”

“So there is all this judgment going back and forth between these people, but what they are feeling are these different extremes. It is still judgment nonetheless.”

Does that then make Sarah just another suburban woman like the three ladies she’s unceremoniously passing judgment on then? “What is a suburban woman?” counters Field. “What is [an African] tribesmen? What is a homosexual midget? What does that mean? What does any of it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“The more I have traveled, the more I have lived in any particular parts of the world, the more I realize if I make any sort of preconceived notions about people they more they will constantly be proven wrong. Those things have no meaning unless people play out those stereotypes because they feel comfortable with them (which is something else altogether). But that’s not [Sarah’s] problem. Here problem is that she has made assumptions saying, ‘If I dress like such or if I act like such than I will be like them.’ She has already damned them to those [stereotypes], but she really doesn’t know them at all.”

“And we, the viewer, don’t know them either. We don’t ever get to go home with them. We never get to walk around with them. We never engage with them. Which, Sarah also thinks if she does engage with them than that means she is not an independent minded woman. That [these women] are mutually exclusive, that an activity could actually exclude you from your own identity which, really, is absolutely absurd.”

“Her identity is full of pretense (which is all about literature) and there is nothing unique about that identity and that is what she is grappling with. Why am I here? Why did I wait eight months into my pregnancy to marry a man I only slept with twice? Why am I living in this house? Why didn’t I get child care when I can afford it? Why did I do any of this? Can I still have a meaningful relationship with this child and still be who I think I want to be?”

All these statements lead then to the question of shame. Shame, not so much for others, but for one’s self; a shame that can only be felt when looking in the mirror and feeling distaste for what is staring back. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Field states vigorously. “My wife said the exact same thing. She said the movie is about shame. It is about what is staring back at you. It is about dealing with that shame and finally deciding to figure out who the hell I am. It is about getting over it now, about saying it is okay, about saying I can past it now. It is about shame and I’m so glad to hear you mention that.”