Wasn't it great when you were little? Or was it? Over recent years there have been a whole host of films about adults in arrested childhood - but most of them have forgotten what being young was really like.
Children can be cruel, manipulative, and perverse. But films tend to sanitise childish adults, holding them up as idealised, almost superior beings able to rise above the complexity, ambiguity, and selfish compromises of adulthood. In "The Waterboy", Adam Sandler plays a childlike adult who somehow manages to transcend years of abuse and convert his misfortune into success, and goes on to win both the game and the girl. Similarly "Forrest Gump" rises up through the social tragedies of the 1960s and 1970s to achieve success in almost every walk of life, largely because of his inability to lose sight of his 'childlike' honesty and blind good will.
In contrast the independents - perhaps as a reaction to this na茂ve treatment by the big studios - have tended to focus on the flip side. Hollywood may idealise childish adults by removing their sexuality but "Gummo" and "Chuck and Buck" tackle head-on the clumsy, uncomfortable, and often perverse aspects of adults trapped with a pre-adolescent sexuality.
One other notable observation applicable to both types of film is the absence of women in these roles. With perhaps the exception of Sissy Spacek in "The Straight Story", it seems only men are treating each new day with wide-eyed wonder or suffering severe turmoil due to their mental constraints.
At the moment, these sweet and sour 'child' films seem content to exist as opposites. Whatever happens next, rest assured, as long as shrinks, gurus, and counsellors keep looking for the roots of neurosis in childhood - we'll see a lot more films like these.
