What does the Kingdom of God mean for us in a world of brokenness?
What does that brokenness look like, and how do we go about trying to seek redemption in spite of it?
These are a few questions I’ve been dwelling on since watching Todd Field’s brilliant film Little Children;if you haven’t seen it, you must. It focuses around two suburban couples dealing with feelings of loneliness and isolation, defeat and obsolescence. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, the housewife with a Master’s in English, married to a man wrapped up in his job and online porn; and Patrick Wilson is Brad, the stay-at-home father trying (for the third time) to pass his boards and become a lawyer, all the while feeling the pressure from his beautiful filmmaker wife (Jennifer Connelly). These two lonely people meet in the park where their kids play during the day, and a lurid love affair erupts in this very same town where a recently released pedophile named Ronnie (Jackie Earl Haley) has returned to live with his beloved mother.
The subject matter in this film is dark and disturbing and upsetting and honest. As a whole it is a movie, I think, that helps us better understand the Kingdom of God. Let me explain.
(Also, a warning: I’m writing this with the reader in mind being someone who’s seen the film, so there will be some spoilers.)
The plight of each character in this movie rings true to the human condition. Here are the embarrassments and little events that cause big heartaches, the daily deaths we experience and rarely talk about. Here is the contemporary American suburbanite: isolated, alienated, longing with authenticity. And so the stage is set, the players are revealed to be in quiet crisis. What will become of them?
Some seek out redemption, others go looking to solve things by themselves. Each path seems doomed for disaster. So what saves these people? What is it that turns each character towards redemption?
In my mind, the answer is simply found in the title: Little Children.
As Sarah and Brad plan their getaway together from their seemingly oppressive suburban existences, they both get sidetracked. Sarah and her young daughter wait in the park where they first met (and agreed to meet this night) for Brad to arrive. But after happening upon a frightened and vulnerable Ronnie, Sarah loses track of her daughter and runs out to find her. The girl is out in the street, staring up into the street light. Something about the wondering nature of a child arrests us in this scene. Sarah gets her back into the car, begins to weep over her, and her own daughter whispers to her, “It’s OK, Mommy.” Grace spoken from a child, a child too young to know the absurdities of adult fantasies and too innocent to know the ways in which adults try to hurt each other. A child, in short, still young enough to believe that things are not too far gone, that we can be taken back yet to where we want to be. Sarah’s attempt to escape her life in search for a fantasy melts in the presence of this child’s naive graciousness, as does our own.
Brad, on the other hand, is distracted on his way to meet Sarah by the very thing that had distracted him from countless hours of studying for the boards: teens skateboarding. Teens whose young age reflected the age at which he was when his mother died, when his own childhood was rushed to an end. On his way to meet Sarah, they ask him to take a crack at a killer jump on the skateboard. He tries, and apparently wipes out BAD. But, he tried. And in doing so, he transported himself back to a day when innocence could be found in the care-freeness of childhood, a time which years and years of concerns and fears and duties had covered over with regrets, loneliness, and self-doubt. He began to re-think (read here repent) his life and see the beauty of his life with his wife and son, and the vast possibilities within it.
Ronnie’s redemption is like that of the other two in the sense that it comes to him unexpected, though surely nonetheless. His beloved mother, who believed in him through everything, dies of a heart attack, but manages to leave him one last message: “Please be a good boy.” Ronnie can think of only one thing that can allow him to avoid the trappings of his sexual deviancy and therefore comply with his mother’s wish, thereby committing a horrible act of self-mutilation. It is his child-like love for his mother, his commitment to her, that prompts this devastating yet loving act, and when he is found by the man who lived the past month as Ronnie’s sworn enemy, he is hurried off to the hospital. Ronnie, who is loved by no one on earth after his mother’s death, is saved by a man who swears to protect him.
So, what at all does a movie about an extramarital affair and pedophilia have to teach us about the Kingdom? I mean, we’re the Christians, right? Shouldn’t we be teaching these characters about the Kingdom? Well, I would in fact suggest that, as I read it, Little Children gives us a fascinating glimpse into that very Kingdom which we so often attempt to claim as our own.
Each of these three characters discover redemption as a result of becoming “child-like” or taking on certain child-like characteristics. For Sarah, it is encountering the forgiveness and simple love that seems to come so easily from a child. For Brad, it is living in that care-freeness that exemplifies childhood that enlivens in him a sense of beauty in his real everyday life. For Ronnie, it was executing a child-like faith through to extreme measures that placed him in the realm of possibility for redemption by Larry. Each case required thinking like a child, which means re-thinking, what Jesus calls being “born again.”
So often we evangelicals hear “born again” and think similarly to how Nicodemus thought: where he heard physical re-birth, we often hear a metaphysical, or spiritual, re-birth, when instead Jesus seems to be suggesting a return to child-likeness without childishness. Our hope in understanding the Kingdom of God lies in our abilities to recognize the child-like limits of our understanding while at the same time acknowledging the worthiness of that thing in which we are placing our hope. To become born again, as Jesus says, we must see ourselves as dependent upon God, unable to correct things by ourselves. We must see ourselves with humor and grace and easy forgiveness. We must see ourselves, in the end, as Sarah and Brad see themselves in Little Children: hopeless fools given a second chance at child-likeness, capable of preserving innocence and playfulness and humility.
If you’ve seen the film, and would like to add your own two cents to mine, feel free.
1 Comment
August 17, 2007 at 11:11 am
rocket spanish
Spanish is important and it is fun too.