KEY POINTS:
The second feature by the writer-director of the perfectly observed In the Bedroom promises so much more than it delivers that it probably seems worse than it really is.
It's a movie that's always about to amount to something but never does: it lets you fancy that it
is about to address the great malaise of our age - the moral panic and hysteria surrounding child sexual abuse - but instead it uses it as the hook for a manipulative little subplot.
For all its assumed moral complexity, it is finally a shallow, smug satire of suburban life that is a messy mix both of style and point of view.
Part of the reason may be the presence as co-screenwriter (with Field) of Tom Perrotta, on whose best-selling novel the film is based. A novelist's sensibility is everywhere apparent and not just in the shifting perspectives - a voiceover narration comes and goes without warning and, worse, we have no idea whose voice it is. The effect is doubtless intended to be post-modern but its glibly ironic spin is always suspect.
The central character, Sarah Pierce (Winslet), a one-time academic, is now a suburban wife and mother whose vagueness cannot conceal her curdled self-loathing about the way her life has turned out.
Her daily playground visits bring her into contact with three other young mothers whose three-witches act is the most egregious of the film's many clunky stereotypes. In their obsessive orderliness, these three exude contempt for everyone, particularly Sarah, but it's pretty early in the piece to be asked to share the film-makers' obvious contempt for them.
When this uneasy quartet is joined by stay-at-home dad Brad Adamson (Wilson), the sexual frisson is electric. You know that within minutes he and Sarah will be at it on the tumble dryer while the kids are having a nap. But their drama of infidelity is devoid of context - their separate marriages, she to a businessman, he to a documentary film-maker (Connelly), are given only the briefest and most banal screen time - and is explicable only as the natural coupling of a Botticelli Venus and a gym bunny.
Meanwhile, a subplot involving a newly released sex offender (Haley) and a bitter ex-cop (Emmerich), full of tantalising moral ambiguities, limps to a climax that is both unexplained and inexplicable.
One assumes that book and film are trying to make some sort of point, in a finger-pointing paranoid age, about the moral equivalence between the "free" world and the rest. But the film is full of such non-sequiturs - the one involving Brad and skateboarding is only the worst - that it leaves behind a vague disappointment and a sense of opportunity missed.
Field and cinematographer Antonio Calvache come up with moments of gobsmacking visual bravura - children fleeing from a swimming pool, a child transfixed under a streetlight - but it all seems as empty and meaningless as the lives they are asking us to inhabit. It's a film you long to love, but it just doesn't measure up.
Cast: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Jackie Earle Haley, Noah Emmerich
Director: Todd Field
Running time: 130 mins
Rating: R16, offensive language and sex scenes
Screening: Lido
Verdict: High-minded infidelity drama is full of Big Ideas but littered with frustrating plot holes