the parent trap; Kate Winslet plays an ambivalent mother in suburbia in Todd Field's adaptation of Little Children.(Movie review)

About halfway through the funny, unsettling Little Children, an unfaithful suburban wife, Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), attends a women's reading group discussing, of all things, Madame Bovary. When the local supermom calls Flaubert's notorious adulteress "a slut," Sarah disagrees. She insists that Emma Bovary's attempt to escape her daily life actually makes her a feminist heroine: "It's not the cheating," Sarah explains. "It's the hunger."

Everybody in this movie is hungry for something-safety, romance, lost youth, the chance to become a better person. Adapted from the bouncy novel by Tom Perrotta, whose earlier book Election became one of the great Hollywood screen comedies, this engrossing picture of Middle American life is all about parents, children, and what happens when you can't tell them apart.

The story centers on a neighborhood playground where the overeducated Sarah doesn't really fit in with the other moms living the domestic dream. She dreads being alone with her young daughter, whom she thinks "an unknowable little person," and has recently discovered that her husband is hooked on Internet porn. Seeking a way out, Sarah sleeps with Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), a handsome young house_husband nicknamed "The Prom King," who's married to Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a joylessly noble documentary filmmaker eager for him to finally pass his bar exam (he's already failed twice). But instead of studying, Brad plays touch football with Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), an ex-cop obsessed with harassing a local pedophile. Ronald McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley) is just out of jail and living with his mother, May (Phyllis Somerville); the neighbors freak out whenever he nears the playground-he's the modern idea of the bogeyman.

Audaciously enough, Little Children's greatest triumph is that, without ever forgiving Ronald's criminal perversity, it makes us feel profound sympathy for this sex offender and his mom, who still dreams her son can learn to be "a good boy." Himself a working actor, director Todd Field fills the whole movie with finely calibrated portraits. He wins a star-making turn from Wilson, previously best known for stage work and his role as the gay Mormon in HBO's Angels in America. His Brad is a weak-willed jock whose boyishly sweet smile betrays a profound inner shallowness. This makes him the perfect foil for Sarah, at once the movie's most conscious and most impulsive character-they bring out the child in each other. Winslet has no peer at portraying women swept away by love, sexual desire, or reckless ideas-you can see the wild blood rouging her cheeks. Whether defending Emma Bovary's adultery or emulating it with Brad as their kids are downstairs, her Sarah is a full-bodied creation-intent, earthy, wrongheaded, and indelibly human.

Little Children is Field's second feature. His first, In the Bedroom, ...