Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connolly, Jackie Earle Haley, Gregg Edelman Running time: 130 mins . . .

WHAT'S in a name? An awful lot if you happen to be called Todd.

Future film historians will look upon that short, harmless nomen and see alienation, sexual dysfunction, depression, paedophilia and pornography.

Think of Todd Solondz's sadistic, satiric worldview in films like Happiness, or Todd Haynes' subversive melodrama Far From Heaven. Films that lift the lid on our idealised comfy-kitchen lives and hold them up to ridicule. Of course, there are others at it too:

Ang Lee's Ice Storm and Sam Mendes's American Beauty were classics . . . cheery as a busted tire in November, thrilling for their X-ray penetration.

Now Todd Field joins the misery club. His Little Children is an entire suburb apart from his first film. In The Bedroom was a sombre reflection of grief tearing ordinary parents apart and a quiet study of revenge. But this is a whole lot darker. Sure, nobody in this film contemplates taking a shovel to someone's head. But their impulses and desires are like icebergs waiting to rip open a ship and they seem happy to steer themselves towards peril.

Little Children is a film about the stupidity of forbidden love and how easy it is to be stupid. Parents kid their children, their partners and they kid themselves. It stars Kate Winslet as Sarah Pierce, a mother living a hollow life in a large house in the suburbs of New England. She spends her afternoons with mothers who talk about falling asleep during sex and who fix their face paint when stayat-home beefcake dad Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson) turns up at the park every day with his young son.

Pierce has a tantrum-throwing toddler who shows her up as a bad mommy when she doesn't get what she wants. But Sarah's needs aren't being met either. When she sees Brad, an affair is the last thing on her mind. But events have a way of forcing people into things . . .

especially when you catch your husband being intimate with himself in front of a computer with another woman's panties on his face.

Add to that, too, the sacrificing of her literary interests to a humdrum marriage . . . deep down, Sarah wants to be tragic.

If ever there was a film that matched Winslet's determination to be all-real-woman instead of a glam doll, this is it: she wears the dowdy housewife look so well . . .

hair lank, eyes puffy with no makeup, and drab clothes. Still she's luminous.

Patrick Wilson's househusband copes well with his domestic duties but his manhood has taken a bashing. He is listless and feels emotionally and sexually neglected by his busy but beautiful workaholic wife (Jennifer Connolly). When frumpy Sarah turns up at the swimming pool in a svelte swimsuit, it's a red rag to his burgeoning lust.

Their passion ripens in a community saturated with anxiety over the return of a pervert, Ronald James McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), who has an unhealthy interest in the neighbourhood children.

Field salts proceedings with pitch-black humour (a couple of scenes involving masturbation provide a disturbed comic relief).

And it has a knowing, literary irony.

Winslet's cheating married mom reads Madame Bovary as she unravels her own life. She understands her own tragedy.

When the actress and arch miserabilist Jane Adams turns up for an astonishingly soul-sick cameo, the game is up: Field is not just referencing his other Todd forebears, he is giving them a wink; and inviting us to have a laugh too.

And this is the film's problem.

Field here emerges as a director of some style, but his command of Little Children is weakened by his insistence on playing it for sardonic laughs. Early on, there is a mood . . . a Hitchcockian twist in the stomach . . . that suggests a real sense of menace and strict directorial control. But then the air clears in a swimming pool scene straight out of the mouth of Jaws. The irony of all this layered knowingness is that the story itself does not know how to wrap up.

Perhaps this is a result of the adaptation from Tom Perrotta's novel. Little Children is deeply, embarrassingly funny. But the final strands of the film are flimsy, contrived and pack no punch . . .

relying as it does on a subplot to deliver some sort of emotional pay-off.