Suburban dissatisfaction gets turned upside down, and then set back right side up again in quick success in Todd Field’s new film, adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel by him and the author. The story is clichéd and trite to the nth degree, of Brad (Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Wilson), both stuck at home caring for their children while their respective spouses work, eventually finding an outlet, an attraction, and maybe some hope or sense of relief, in one another. The first sign that Little Children may be about to do something new with this scenario is by injecting a surprisingly voiceover that introduces characters, describes what they are sometimes thinking or feeling, and, to top it off, sometimes describes an action that Field has already visualized. The effect, while sometimes straight, comes off mostly as sardonic or ironic, simply by virtue of the faux-serious baritone of the voice and its often needless and definitely intrusive existence. This peculiar tonal shift in the film is taken to further extremes by a contrapuntal subplot in the same neighborhood involving the recent return of a man (Jackie Earle Haley) convicted of some form of deviant sexual behavior involving children (the crime is stated to be indecent exposure, but it is not clear if that is correct). He is pressured to find a girlfriend by his supportive mother, all the while the both of them having to deal with the area’s resident McCarthyist fascist (Noah Emmerich), whose failing family and professional life have found an outlet for frustration in the activity of persecuting the criminal. A sympathetic sex criminal is thusly juxtaposed against the early-midlife crises of our attractive leads, all of which is generally fleshed out by an all-too-knowing voiceover and a come-and-go absurdity of the writing. In the case of the latter—where, for example, the man is distracted from a crucial late night rendezvous by an invitation to skateboard with a bunch of neighborhood kids he has long admired, or in the caricatures of Sarah’s husband and of the other neighborhood married mothers—Little Children almost seems to be going in the direction of itself satirizing mainstream satires of suburban life, like American Beauty and Desperate Housewives. But this potentially undercutting comedic edge is too helter-skelter and vague throughout the movie to even be described as parody, satire, or distanciation—instead it is merely odd and unexplainable—and by the end it is clear that Field and Perrotta are taking the lives of their characters and their situation with an serious earnestness. There is a heavy pretense to profundity in the film’s dramatization of such a hackneyed suburban-familial-angst scenario. This wouldn’t be so awful if the movie was as measured and modest as its setting and visual style seems to indicate, and the uniformly excellent performances of the cast struggle valiantly to keep the movie going on an actorly basis. But by the end, when the director is cross-cutting a night of furious character crises, dangers, and epiphanies all at the same time, the low-key audaciousness and perplexity of what is trying to be expressed thematically and what is really coming across by the tone and by the writing of the film truly does achieve absurdity.