"Lead Us Not Into Temptation..."

One line from the Lord's Prayer reads as follows:

”And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

I thought of this prayer as I watched a fascinating movie over the weekend, Todd Field's “Little Children,” starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. Based on a book by Tom Perrotta, the movie is richly layered, superbly acted, deeply moving, and profoundly provocative. This review is categorized into two sections: “temptation” and “evil.” Let's look at the following questions:

* Is falling into “temptation” necessarily a bad thing? Are there circumstances in which we become enriched by indulging in temptation?

* How do we characterize “evil”? How do we interface with “evil”?

Warning: the following contains "spoilers" - if you haven't seen the movie "Little Children," and you don't want to know the plot, skip reading this!

"Temptation"

Winslet plays Sarah, a disillusioned young woman, bored with her life as a mother to young Lucy. As a housewife in an upscale New England suburb, many aspects of her life are alien to her, except for her “Room of One's Own,” (Virginia Woolf reference duly noted), where she reads and contemplates her beloved novels and poetry. To make matters worse, she is estranged from her husband; one afternoon she discovers to her disgust that he regularly masturbates while surfing Internet porn (“Slutty Kay” and kitchen utensils?!). This discovery imposes a wide gulf between Sarah and her husband. So wide, in fact, that she relegates her husband to the couch, implying a complete lack of intimacy.

Sarah has a Master's degree in English (she never quite finished her dissertation), and she longs for the intellectual stimulation that her studies provided; but instead she spends her days at the local park with other local moms and their children. The other stay-at-home moms cause conflicting emotions within Sarah. She is alienated by what she perceives as their smallness and cattiness; and yet she also feels inadequate because she's not a militantly organized “super-mom” as the other moms are. This is the community she's “supposed to” feel close to, but she can't bring herself to identify with these women.

Then, a local “house-husband” named Brad enters the picture to stir things up. Though they never actually speak to him, the women at the park have tagged Brad the “Prom King,” as he is exceptionally handsome. Sarah agrees with their assessment, but isn’t as intimidated. On a dare from the other women, Sarah approaches him at the park one morning. (She perceives this as an opportunity to differentiate herself from the other women.) Brad and Sarah strike up small-talk as they push their respective children on the swings. Sarah is struck by how authentic and vulnerable Brad seems as he describes how he’s failed the bar exam twice. As Brad prepares to leave the park, Sarah makes a bold and spontaneous move; she proposes to Brad that they hug in front of the other women. Though they’ve just met, Brad plays along. Immediately after the hug, Sarah follows an impulse to crank up the tension; she suggests that they kiss. Suddenly they share an awkward but intimate kiss on the playground, to the great shock and horror of the other women at the park. This hug and kiss assuages Sarah's sense of alienation and inadequacy (temporarily, at least). And so begins an adulterous affair between Sarah and Brad. The two share their summer days at the local pool with their kids, and then, while the kids nap, indulge in steamy unbridled sex.

The emotional aspect of the affair is most interesting to me. Clearly, both Sarah and Brad share a lustful appetite for each other. But Sarah longs for something more; she covets an emotional connection to mitigate the idea that this affair is exclusively sexual. One afternoon, during sex, Sarah asks Brad, "is your wife pretty?" (According to the book, the character of Sarah is supposed to be a somewhat homely, frumpy woman who feels insecure about her looks. But frankly it's hard for Kate Winslet to look homely and/or frumpy; she's such a beautiful woman, though not the typical "Hollywood-type" beauty.) Brad pleads, “do we have to talk about this now?” and ignores her inquiry, as if it's an inconvenience. She asks again, saying this time, "it's a simple question." But Brad lacks any pretense of emotional intelligence. "Yes, she’s very pretty," he says, without a hint of irony. Later he confides that his wife is “a knock-out,” but then follows up with, "but beauty is overrated." As the narrator points out, this is an easy statement for a beautiful person to make. Sarah is quietly devastated. The subtext of Sarah's question was to engage Brad to notice and acknowledge her own beauty, as he saw her. Rather than sing the praises of Sarah's beauty, Brad answers the question literally, and he completely fails to respond to her desire for an emotional (rather than a purely sexual) connection. We also gain insight from another brief exchange; Brad asks Sarah as they're having sex, "Do you feel bad about this?" "No, I don't," replies Sarah emphatically. Brad replies, "I do. I feel really bad." (Though his “feeling bad” doesn’t seem to diminish his carnal enjoyment.) Sarah's lack of guilt and shame is an offering to Brad of her genuine emotional engagement in this affair. To Sarah, this isn't just sex; she perceives this relationship as having the potential to grow into something "real." But for Brad, this affair is a happy carnal diversion, with none of Sarah’s earnest emotional engagement.

Brad's narcissism ultimately dooms the affair. Sarah is so desperate to “legitimize” her relationship with Brad that she tells Brad that she “can't go on” in the shadows anymore. Brad takes the bait and tells her, “...let's run away together and figure this thing out.” Sarah is elated with the prospect of it. Like two teenagers, they agree to “run away together.” Except that Brad's cowardice combined with his allegiance to his wife (and perhaps his fear of his mother-in-law) ultimately triumph. (Or perhaps it is not entirely fair to characterize Brad as a “coward,” since I think he feels somewhat emasculated as a “house-husband,” completely reliant on his wife and her family for income. Surely it is a blow to his ego when his wife chastises him for ordering magazine subscriptions that he doesn't really “need.” But Brad may be too comfortable with his house-husband status, and unwilling to grapple with the implications of entering the work-force to earn a living in this “man's world.” He might have to actually study and take the bar exam!)

Within this context of compromise, Brad writes a “Dear John...” letter to his wife, but takes the letter with him rather than leaving it where she'll find it. Then, on his way to meet Sarah to enact their great escape together, Brad decides on a whim that it would be more entertaining to skateboard with the local teens at the skate park. When Sarah realizes that Brad has stood her up, her devastation is compounded by her ultimate realization that she was willing to risk her child's safety and future to pursue this ill-fated relationship with an emasculated man. Sarah returns home with her daughter and tucks her in bed, utterly crushed by Brad's choices as well as her own perceived failings.

So what's the “moral” here? Both Sarah and Brad freely chose to “live in the moment” and indulge in temptation. Both Sarah and Brad were dissatisfied with their respective home lives, and found passion and excitement in each other. Despite the ultimately ill-fated course of the relationship, was there nothing redeeming about it? Sarah was able to live out her “Madame Bovary” complex and indulge in an affair that briefly assuaged her assaulted sense of self as a suburban housewife. She took solace from the idea that she was different from other stay-at-home moms. At the end of the affair, she can go on knowing that she made choices and took actions to free herself from her current unhappiness, even if these choices and actions resulted in an outcome she did not anticipate (or perhaps she did anticipate, but chose to ignore). Brad was less vulnerable to the emotional entanglements of the affair (since he was “the beautiful one” and clearly a narcissist), and he benefited from realizing that, despite the alienation from his wife, he did not want to risk losing her and all the comforts that she provides for him. And both Sarah and Brad learned that while we may no longer be teenagers, we can still experience the same ferocious euphoria and profound devastation that can come from indulging in lustful desire. Indulging in temptation can have the temporary but profoundly real effect of making us feel “alive.” Are Sarah and Brad “sinners,” or are they fallible human beings subject to the most basic human frailty of desire and longing, despite the inherent risks and unknowable outcomes?

"Evil"

If the core of the movie is "temptation," the sub-plot of "Little Children" is "evil." A sex offender named Ronnie, having served time for exposing himself to minors, lives in the same neighborhood as Sarah and Brad. Ronnie lives with his elderly mother, in an old house filled with antique clocks. A local ex-cop leads a campaign to inform the community of this sex-offender within the neighborhood, posting flyers and harassing Ronnie at all hours. He even goes so far as to spray paint "EVIL" on the front walk leading to Ronnie's house. The relationship between Ronnie and his mother is touching but also somewhat unnerving. During one conversation, Ronnie's mother prophetically marvels at how fragile life is. "You're a miracle, Ronnie. We're all miracles. Know why? Because as humans, every day we go about our business, and all that time we know... we all know... that the things we love... the people we love, at any time now can all be taken away. We live knowing that and we keep going anyway." His mother, growing concerned at her failing health and the prospect of Ronnie living alone, decides to put a singles ad in the paper for her son. "Mom, I have a psycho-sexual disorder," Ronnie protests. But he agrees to go on the date. The date seems to go well, as Ronnie gently attempts to relate to the young woman - a tragic victim of mental illness herself. At one point during the date, Ronnie says to his her, “…you’re not so bad.” (Pathetically, the woman finds this bland attempt at a complement as rather endearing.) But gentleness evolves into monstrosity on the way home, as he asks her to stop the car and then proceeds to perform a lewd act in her presence. Aghast and terrified, she drops him off at home and speeds away.

Clearly, Ronnie is mentally ill, and he is aware of his illness. But is he "evil"? The tragedy is that he isn't getting the treatment or attention he needs. He is cast as a social pariah, rejected and scorned where ever he goes. One afternoon, he visited the local pool and was publicly humiliated; the entire pool was vacated and the cops arrived to demand that he leave the premises. "I was just trying to cool off," he protested. The mob mentality exhibited at the pool surely cemented Ronnie’s feelings of isolation.

Ronnie certainly suffers from tendencies that are arguably "evil," but society's “mob mentality” and lack of empathy and compassion are arguably just as evil. When his mother dies, he decompensates, as the only thread he had to humanity unraveled. He reads a note from his mother that she wrote on her death bed, which simply states, "Be a good boy." Utterly distraught, because he knows he can't be a "good boy" without her, he mutilates himself with a knife, and the tragedy is complete. Despite his illness, Ronnie is a human being who deserves our compassion and mercy to help him treat his illness, instead of ostracizing and dehumanizing him. But as long as the "evil-doer" (in this case, Ronnie) is available as the easy target for scorn and fury, it exonerates the local suburbanites from looking too deeply at themselves. Ronnie's "evilness" is insidious precisely because it's too obvious, and because it diverts us from the genuine Spiritual path of examining our own behaviors, actions and attitudes toward our fellow humans.