Little Men

Synopsis: When Brian (Greg Kinnear) inherits his father's Brooklyn terrace house, he and his wife, Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), a psychotherapist who is the main breadwinner of the family, move in with their 13-year-old son, Jake (Theo Taplitz) who becomes firm friends with Tony (Michael Barbieri), the son of Leonor (Paulina Garcia), a friend of Brian's father who gave her cheap rent on the ground floor shop that is part of the building.  Pressured by his sister (Talia Balsam), Brian, a jobbing actor with limited income, tries to renegotiate the lease in their favour but Leonor digs in and the boys are brought face-to-face with the world of adults.

As we have seen with Married Life (2008) and Love is Strange (2014) director and co-writer Ira Sachs is at his best when he works on a small canvas and holds our attention with the subtle accuracies of his portraiture (his 2012 film, Keep The Lights On, is more ambitious and suffers because of it). Whilst the territory is similar to that favoured by Mike Leigh - families under duress because of pressing social and economic conditions – with Sachs the emphasis is very much on the personal rather than the political.

The result is a film that carefully interweaves its two main elements, on the one hand the close friendship between the quietly sensitive and artistic Jake and the more outgoing Tony, and, on the other, the dilemma of Jake’s parents, Brian, in particular, who must sacrifice friendship for the sake of financial reality.  This core material is broadened with a kind of reflection on the tenuous choice of acting as a career with Tony as a keen young aspirant and Brian, a thespian whose moment in the spotlight has never come.  There is no really strong dramatic agenda here, events simply unfold and we are left to observe for ourselves the boys spontaneous camaraderie (and its melting away), Brian’s ineffectual attempts to deal with modern life (probably as effective a representation of a “failed” actor as we have seen), his wife’s level-headed pragmatism and Leonor’s surprisingly dogged determination to preserve values which stand for nothing in our modern world..

Carrying a considerable portion of the film the two young actors are particularly good, giving the boys' friendship an easy, natural quality whilst KInnear, albeit in familiar mode, quietly brings home Brian’s pain and Garcia defies expectations as his formidable, if unintended, foe.  In terms of packaging, the realistic approach brings us some nice photography of a more suburban Brooklyn than we usually see on screen, my only reservation being Dickon Hinchcliffe’s reiterative four note theme tune which seems to have been lifted from the closing sequence of another film of teenage friendship, Napoleon Dynamite.   

Purposely restrained in the telling, Little Men, a low-key reflection on loss of innocence and the harsh realities of adulthood, is a small film but not an insubstantial one.

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