Little Children

Note: Spoiler below

Before I saw it, Little Children seemed like the kind of movie where I'm supposed to be impressed by the sophistication of beautiful, suburbanite postcollegiates with too much time on their hands, having affairs and feeling very put upon by the world. But the characters quickly started looking like people I might know. People whose lives were outwardly mundane had personal dramas so intense I thought through the whole movie that someone would die a horrible death in the end, probably a child. Having seen it, I wish someone would have told me that's not the case; it would have made what did happen carry its own weight instead of a false sense of impending doom.

I wage a debate now and then with thecrazydreamer about free will versus determinism. I wholeheartedly believe in both, while he tends to feel that determinism is not only wrong but a harmful way to look at things. Little Children is full of people who believe they have come to this point in their lives unwillingly, that they have been unwitting participants in the sabotage of their own identities: a pedophile blames his mother; Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson) blame their spouses and children.

My basic belief is that we cannot do other than what we do; our lives could never have been different. But only from an omniscient point of view. Someone who knew everything that went into every decision and action could accurately predict what would happen next; since it isn't possible for us to know what will happen, to our minds we act with complete free will. I can do anything physically possible in the next moments, even if it runs entirely contradictory to my character, because free will exists in my lack of knowledge about the past and future.

Acknowledging that I am who I have become through my own decisions is empowering. It can turn a life that seems suffocating into a life of newly realized purpose. Little Children is a clear call to personal responsibility: either realize your complicity in who you have become and feel the full weight and importance of human existence, or fail to admit or realize you're guilty for your own actions and live impotently, lacking that existential knowledge and feeling of importance.