“We want what we want, there’s nothin’ much we can do about it”

A fantastic story of love, naivety, illusions, and truths. This movie opens your eyes to see layer after layer of parallels between the “little children” in the world. A man is publicly ridiculed, abused, and feared for his sexual psychological disorder. He lives with his mother after getting out of prison and he lives life with his mother doing everything for him. He is a helpless child with a problem that he desperately wishes to escape from, everyone else sees him as a monster. Two young couples, married with young children are struggling with different issues in their marriages. The lives of one wife and the other husband combine when they meet at the playground and pool with their children. In many ways, Sara and Brad are the most naïve, immature “little children” in the whole movie, and the story can really be thought of as a coming of age story about them actually “growing up”. They give in to their adulterous impulses and naively live as if they can make this last. They are content and happy to have found this false happiness, for a little while. But it is nothing. It is only a fantasy in their minds like that of their kids or any child playing pretend and escaping from the grueling reality that is creeping with husbands who masturbate to naked girls online and wives who can’t see past their own selfishness to see her husband and his unhappiness.

As the story progresses, I found myself sympathizing with old Ronnie, the pedophile, living with his mother day after day in the shadows of hate that were all around him. Especially one shadow in the shape of a man who has nothing more to do with his life than spend his energy showing his anger publicly by destroying and defacing Ronnie’s house. His own history reflects his own flaws which cause him to lose the ability to keep working his job as a police officer. His mistake was an action that came out of his own personal flaws; weakness, cowardice, and a simple human mistake. Things that he essentially had control over, and which haunts him as he struggles to place his shame and self-hatred on the poor old Ronnie living with his aging mother, a man, (who is truly still a little child) who in may ways is the least guilty of all the characters in the story. It was incredible how the story draws out these hidden truths that the world hides so well. In a world where we can outwardly hate others for their human weaknesses, but simultaneously we condone and even “root for” the adulterous couple who find love outside of marriage. We want them to be together; it feels right, it is a beautiful love story, why shouldn’t they be together? These evils taking place behind closed doors, people who never really grew up and still have the ability to entertain fantasies of love in their minds while living a lie with their own husbands/wives and children displays for us, in the movie, what we don’t really want to see or accept. We want them to run away together at the end don’t we? We fall in love with their story and their fantasy and for them to get away would be a fitting “happily ever after”, wouldn’t it?

Coming to the end of the movie, poor Ronnie’s mother dies and leaves him alone. I absolutely love the scene where he breaks down. The living room covered in ceramic statuettes of little children everywhere, the old clocks on the wall and sitting around the room; the chimes go off and he goes crazy crashing the clocks to the floor and breaking everything in the room as the loud chimes are going off all around him. His time is up. He has to wake up now. No more mommie to take care of him. He is still a child in truth, and like a helpless child who looses his mom in the mall or at the park, he has no idea what to do, he just looses his mind (what’s left of it) and breaks down. He cries and runs off down the street, heading for the park… perfect.

Sara is the first to acknowledge to Brad that their love is nothing more than a fantasy, it isn’t real. It can’t be. She at least understands that they have some kind of responsibility to face. But in the end, she gives in once again to her fantasy of running off with her lover to start a new life. Just take the kids and run. No thought to how this would affect their children or their families, just impulsive and reckless, like a child who gets into the car of a stranger offering them candy. But a few things happen that represent the turning point in their lives, the points when they both “wake up” and finally grow up. While she is waiting for Brad at the park to run away with their children, she finds poor Ronnie sitting on a swing, crying, and hunched over his knees. She offers him help and he looks up at her with the most pathetic, tear-stained face I’ve ever seen. He tells her his mom is dead, and she feels sympathy for him. Sympathy for the horrible monster. Meanwhile, Brad decides to jump in with the kids skate-boarding on the stairs and knocks himself out. He may have the mindset of a kid, but his body has continued to grow without him. As he wakes up to find himself flat on the ground, he realizes his limitations, both physically and mentally, and calls his wife at home, as Sara returns to her home with her daughter.

Near the end we meet the raging ex-police officer who confronts Ronnie at the park. As he apologizes for all the things he’s done, Ronnie stands up and turns around to reveal how he has taken matters into his own hands to put a stop to his evil actions and lustful routines directed toward little children, as blood spills from between his pant legs onto the ground. Now his life depends on this man who had once hated him with everything he had. He gets him to the hospital in the end, and at the same time realizes that he and this man are, in many ways the same. But they are just as different in the same sense that his own mistakes and flaws were not only personal weakness, but very poor choices. On the other hand, the man bleeding to death before him was just a victim of a mental disorder which caused him relentless and non-stop pain throughout his life in the public eye. Think how this contrasts with the “victimization” behind closed doors of the poor Brad and Sara who just want to escape and be in love. Isn’t that what we want for them too? After all they are only victims of sad lives without happiness or the love like they see in the fairytales.

We could start to sympathize with how they are “stuck” in their unhappy marriages, and just can’t help the fact that they’ve fallen in love. After all “we want what we want, and there’s nothing much we can do about it” right? So to what extent do we excuse their actions of love and selfish desires? We don’t want to see it, but it’s there; the fact that in life we make choices which have consequences. Sometimes the outcome of a decision turns sour for a while, but just as we have the ability to make the decision in the first place or run away from it when we get scared or find something else, we also have the ability to accept where we are in life and do something to make it better. They both married people that they loved, they never bothered to look at that person and see that what they once had was something they never lost, they just had to find it again, work it out, for themselves and for their children. They were so close to leaving behind their lives and hurting those they loved for the sake of an illusion. The point when we realize and accept the combination of facts that we have control of our lives, but also have responsibilities within that life is a one of the moments that mark a person’s transition from a child to an adult.

I am a second year English major at Wright State University. I am an honors student, studying creative writing. I have never previously published. I keep a portfolio of essays submitted to various classes that have earned a grade of “A”.