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Todd Field’s superb film adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta, begins in a clean and leafy suburban playground, where toddlers cavort under the watchful, benevolent gazes of their pretty young mothers. This may strike you as a rare tableau of innocence in a hectic world, unless, that is, you have spent time in such a place. For the playground really is a scene of primordial brutality, in which a few agreed-upon rules — play nice, share your toys, no hitting — barely suppress the essential savagery of the human species.

I’m not talking about the kids; they’re perfectly sweet. “Little Children,” its title notwithstanding, is a rigorous study of adult behavior, and the first playground scene, introduced by an unseen narrator whose smooth, authoritative voice is familiar from luxury-car commercials, sets a tone that is both compassionate and severe.

It can be observed that the chorus of viciously competitive moms, who reappear now and then throughout the movie to pass judgment and enforce social norms, amounts to a caricature, tinged with snobbery and misogyny. True enough, but those mean mothers nonetheless offer a glimpse into the larger reality that is one of the film’s main areas of inquiry, as it was the novel’s: the empty, invidious, anxious feelings that accompany material and domestic fulfillment.

Set in a Massachusetts suburb with many scenes filmed on location in New York, “Little Children,” which will be shown this weekend at the New York Film Festival before opening in New York and Los Angeles next Friday, balances tenderness with satire. It takes seriously the complaints of people whose lives are, by any objective historical measure, almost impossibly privileged (though they would no doubt describe themselves as middle class). But the movie, which Mr. Field and Mr. Perrotta wrote together, does not, in the manner of other, more facile examinations of suburban dysfunction (like “American Beauty”) assume that it or its audience is better than its characters. The combination of self-regard and anxiety that the characters display makes such judgment superfluous in any case.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), sitting in that maternal playground klatch, insists to herself (in the narrator’s voice, an unsettling and effective touch) that while she may be in this world, she is not of it: “a researcher studying the behavior of typical suburban women, not a typical suburban woman.” Sarah has been to graduate school, and though she never received a doctorate, she did acquire the habit of living within the protective quotation marks that the postmodern academy hands out in addition to (and sometimes in lieu of) substantive knowledge.

Her bouts of parental ineptness — forgetting to bring a snack to the park for her daughter, Lucy, for example — are both humiliating and self-aggrandizing. Sarah’s sloppiness is a sign, to herself and the others, that she is too fine a creature to be bothered with the trivia of parenthood. Ms. Winslet, as fine an actress as any working in movies today, registers every flicker of Sarah’s pride, self-doubt and desire, inspiring a mixture of recognition, pity and concern that amounts, by the end of the movie, to something like love.

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