Traps of Life

Traps of Life
Current mood: aggravated
Category: Life

The other night I saw Little Children with a couple of my friends. It was a good movie, and Kate Winslet was amazing!

I should stop here to say that the philosophical issues that I am going to bring up pertain to the ending. As such, if you do not want to know how the movie ends, stop reading and go about your merry business. If you don't care, then by all means, carry one.

***SPOILER*** LAST CALL

Beyond the incredible acting, I was impressed by the solid content of the struggles that people face in their lives. Extreme cases like the guy with the psychosexual disorder were coupled with couples' jealousies. This impressed me. I was of course taken in immediately with the primary issue that they were addressing, that of unhappiness in life and relationships. When Kate's character gave her input on Madame Bovarie (that she was heroic for fighting against the fate given to her and the unhappiness that it brought) I was excited that they were making fighting against that struggle the noble thing to do.

Though throughout the movie, you really couldn't say that the acts that they were committing were honorable, you really felt for the characters as they cheated on their spouses with one another. They were living miserably in their marriages, and even before there was sex, there was happiness in the relationship that they were building with each other.

The culmination of my happiness came when they decided to leave together. I think that they were finally going to be honest about their feelings and leave their misery behind was exactly what needed to happen. In fact, their crime never would have been committed if they had indeed simply been honest with their spouses to begin with. To finally be honest, quit the cheating and lying, and embrace happiness all at the same time was exactly what they should have done.

Then of course, came the end. Somehow they completely did a 180 and marched straight back into their old lives. Kate seemed to do it as a sacrifice for his daughter, where her love (Patrick Wilson) seemed to do it out of fear. Both scenarios are horrible to me. I know that this is an independent film and that for the most part, any form of predictable, happy ending is thrown out, but this scenario completely validates what so many people do with their lives.

Fear, and some bizarre sense of necessary sacrifice seem to be the most prevalent causes of continued misery in the human existence. Life will never be "perfect," but the amount of hell that people put themselves through by "just dealing with it" is simply appalling. I think that if people were more honest with themselves from the beginning, less bad relationships would exist. Then, if somehow a bad relationship is created, if people weren't foolish enough to give into this fear or compulsion, it wouldn't go as far as it normally does. The first would probably reduce the number of divorces, for people wouldn't end up in as many bad marriages, and the second would make it so that the common wisdom wasn't that marriage will ultimately make you unhappy.

The best relationships that I have ever seen are the ones where people are honest, and deal with the problems that exist. They aren't willing to sacrifice themselves, or give into fear. At what point in our existence did we decide that these things were ok?

Though the movie as a whole was incredible, and in large part the writing was phenomenal, I have to say that I am disappointed in both Todd Field and Tom Perrotta for having their ending give into this already exasperated human condition.