In a festive season uncharacteristically thin on blockbusters or would-be blockbusters, three dramas opening in the next weeks provide some meaty entertainment.
Kate Winslet, currently voicing a feisty girl-rat in the animated Flushed Away, proves she can also voice an American mom in Little Children (opening December 22). This is a story of middle-class lives in middle America, and she is entirely convincing as Sarah, who is enduring her husband and looking after her child, though she is a less conspicuously capable mom than others in her circle. They’re all fantasising about Brad, the good-looking dad who’s playing house-husband and bringing his kid to the park they frequent, but it’s Sarah who connects with him — and the connection grows in ways that are deemed inappropriate but also clearly reflect their respective needs.
Brad is played by Patrick Wilson, who uses and overcomes his rather bland handsomeness to give the character real inner life and conviction. Both he and Winslet do a first-rate job in a drama that depends heavily on good performances.
It also depends on a good script, which it has (by Tom Perotta and director Todd Field). The context of the Sarah/Brad relationship is a townlet caught up in a whole lot of paranoia over a paedophile who has recently been freed from jail and is now living there — hence the title. His story is a powerful sidelight on the main narrative strand; there’s a scene at the public swimming pool that is a masterpiece of scary-funny filmmaking.
Jackie Haley is outstanding as the paedophile, and Noah Emmerich is as good as the man who wants to run him out of town, but it’s really Winslet and Wilson’s movie. Despite an ending that rather forces their liaison to a conclusion, Little Children is an acutely observed, riveting and moving portrait of ordinary, complicated lives.
Augusten Burroughs certainly had a complicated life, at least between the ages of 12 and 15, when he was farmed out to live with his mother’s psychologist as his parents broke up and his mom put all her energies into getting in touch with her so-called creativity. This happened in the late 1970s, and the film based on Burroughs’s bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors (opening December 29), has a fine sense of the period — a kind of mad aftermath of the 1960s.
It also has a fine sense of the emotional pain to which a parent can subject a child, and in that respect Running with Scissors is sometimes hard to watch — although it’s also very funny. A lot of the time, as one watches poor Augusten going through all sorts of craziness, either at the hands of his monstrous mother or through the ministrations of the distinctly wacky shrink and his family, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. (It should be noted that Burroughs, which is not his real name, has been subsequently accused of exaggerating his experiences in his memoir — the film, at least, should I think be taken as fiction.)
Annette Bening is superb as Augusten’s extremely self-absorbed mother, and Brian Cox is frighteningly good as the shrink with all sorts of peculiar ideas (including the oracular properties of the turd). Gwyneth Paltrow has a strong and utterly unegotistical supporting role, while Jill Clayburgh all but steals the picture as the shrink’s withdrawn wife.
Joseph Cross, playing Augusten himself, does sterling and very sympathetic work. But then you’ve got to feel for someone who’s barely 15 and finds that the sanest thing in his life is his love affair with a schizophrenic in his thirties.
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (opening December 29) is as powerful a drama as either of the other two movies, though it takes the form of a crime thriller. He and scriptwriter William Monahan have recast the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, but where that (excellent) movie is sleek and stylised, wasting little time on explanations or psychology, Scorsese and Monahan give the story considerably more texture and background.
The plot concept is a symmetry of informers: one within the police force, a mole for a crime boss, and the other the undercover cop planted deep inside the crime lord’s operation. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio take these roles, and give fine, understated performances. The latter, particularly, seems to get better all the time.
They are rather shouted down, though, by Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the crime boss in question. One suspects that Scorsese gave him his head, and, whatever the pleasures of seeing Nicholson doing his thing, it does rather unbalance the movie — but then Scorsese has always been fascinated by charismatic evildoers, like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas or the Daniel Day Lewis figure in Gangs of New York. Here, it might have been wiser to get Nicholson to dial it back a bit and for the movie to focus on the opposed moles, but in the end it doesn’t matter that much. The Departed is still a very good thriller, which even at two and a half hours holds the attention tightly — meaning that it’s a very good drama too.