"I'm not letting this one drown."

Anybody who’s watched Desperate Housewives knows the kind of sordid behavior that goes on in suburbia. Those cul-de-sacs and manicured lawns play host to dark impulses that include, but are not limited to, illicit sexual attraction and seething rage. Like Housewives, Little Children uses its bland, conventional setting to tell us stories of lust, betrayal and fear using a mix of comedy and drama, and a wry, omniscient narrator.

Kate Winslet, in a rich and nuanced performance, plays Sarah Pierce, a young stay-at-home mom growing increasingly distant from her neglectful husband. The routine demands of motherhood aren’t satisfying or stimulating for Sarah – she seems baffled by her toddler daughter – and she has little in common with the other neighborhood mothers. Brad (Patrick Wilson) is a stay-at-home dad who’s supposed to be prepping for his third try at the bar exam but can’t muster much enthusiasm for studying. After they meet at the playground the two find themselves using their children as an excuse to spend their afternoons together. One thing leads to another and before long, well, if this laundry room’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’.

"My unfaithful husband alarm just went off."

Meanwhile, convicted pedophile Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earl Haley) has been released from prison and come to live with his mother, sparking community-wide panic. Brad’s friend Larry, a disgraced former cop, makes it his personal mission to harass Ronnie, in the hope, I guess, that he’ll move and become a menace to some other neighborhood’s children.

This tale of unhappy marriages and misplaced emotions plays out in ways I didn’t always expect and usually found fascinating. The Little Children of the title are pretty much everybody, each character caught in a gentle snare of narcissism and arrested development. Sarah is clinging to the promise of romance and passion subliminally instilled by her English Lit degree while Brad is trying to recapture his youth with the local skateboarders and his nighttime football league. And Ronnie, well, if he ever had a chance to become more than a pathetic man-child it surely won’t happen while the neighbors are spray-painting “evil” on his sidewalk.

"How did those vows go . . . forsaking all others? Come on Brad, you can find a loophole in this."

The script, adapted by Tom Perrotta and director Todd Field from Perrotta’s novel, subverts expectations in subtle ways. It’s rare for a movie to depict a mother who’s not completely enamored of her child without making her a villain, but Sarah, while sometimes selfish and infuriating, remains sympathetic and I found her relationship with her daughter to be one of the most interesting in the film. Since Sarah’s marriage seems essentially dead and Brad and his wife (an underused Jennifer Connelly) are drifting apart, the illicit romance might be portrayed as redemptive and life-affirming, but Sarah and Brad really have nothing in common so, regardless what you think of their morality, it’s hard to believe that they would end up any happier together than they are with their spouses.

The most common word used to describe Oscar-nominee Haley’s performance is “creepy” but I think that does him a disservice. He has his moments, don’t get me wrong, but Haley makes him much more than a monster, and the town’s reaction helps you to sympathize with him. In a scene where he invades the neighborhood pool, causing a mass exodus, you get the feeling, yes, that he’s not just there to swim, but I have to think the parents caused more trauma yanking their kids out of the pool than Ronnie caused by jumping in.

"What shall we talk about next, the fact that Sarah's a neglectful mother or the fact that she's a slut?"

At first I found the film’s narration to be off-putting, feeling that it was telling me things I was quite able to figure out on my own. But the often hilariously dry commentary – by the narrator of Frontline, lending an air of ironic distance – grew on me and became essential to the film’s tone.

There were a few moments where the plot stretched plausibility. And I suppose the trio of judgmental neighborhood moms is a bit of a caricature, though there’s no doubt that’s how the insecure Sarah would see them. Little Children, while at times a bit heavy-handed, is a smart, funny, thoughtful film that sticks with you long after you leave the theater.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas