One from the Checkout Line

The children in Little Children are like aliens. They may be in this world, but they are not of it. With their tiny heads and big eyes, they stare and jut their imperceptible hips and fixate passionately on such objects as plush jester's hats and light-addled moths. The kids in question belong to Sarah (a rumpled, lovely Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson), two stay-at-home parents who chance to meet at a suburban playground. Sarah is sitting apart from the other mothers, attempting—according to the intrusive narration—to survey them like an anthropologist among the natives. Brad is pushing his kid on a swing when Sarah approaches. She wants to make the other mothers jealous, she explains. She gets his phone number. Then they kiss.

Against the backdrop of their quickly feverish, sun-dappled affair, a pedophile named Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) moves into his mother's house nearby. Mass hysteria blooms. The sympathetic (if childish) drive for pleasure that leads Brad and Sarah into each other's arms holds no such rewards for Ronnie. To say that he is the first sympathetic pedophile in the movies would be stretching it a little—for one thing, Haley, a former child actor, is now ugly as sin. But Ronnie is pitiable, and his mother still loves him, and those paltry scraps contain all the makings of tragedy.