Ira Sachs (2016)
Real-estate costs in New York City, moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn, skating along the sidewalks there, friendship between teenage boys: these themes or details in Ira Sachs’ previous film, Love is Strange (2014), all feature again in his latest, Little Men. Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear) is a not very successful actor. His wife Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) is a psychotherapist, who earns a lot more than her husband. They have a thirteen-year-old son, Jake (Theo Taplitz). The Jardines live in Manhattan. When his father Max dies, Brian inherits a two-storey house in Brooklyn and the family moves into the upper floor. On the lower floor is a dress shop, run by Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García), a Chilean immigrant. Single-mother Leonor got on so well with Max that he’d not upped the rent for years. She too has a thirteen-year-old son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who is often around the shop. Tony and Jake become good friends but tensions between the adults arise when Brian and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) propose to triple the rent on the downstairs apartment. Jake and Tony know only that they’re no longer welcome in each other’s homes; they join forces in stopping speaking to their parents. Eventually, the boys find out about the grown-ups’ dispute. Jake pleads tearfully but unavailingly with his father to let Leonor stay without increasing her rent. The boys’ friendship ends.
If you’re going to do a drama driven largely by the local property market and rental costs, you need a credible economic-domestic scenario in which to base the action. Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, who shares the screenplay credit (as he did on Love is Strange), don’t provide this: the Jardines’ financial situation is far from clear. When they first come over to the Brooklyn property for Max’s funeral reception there, they’re undecided as to whether to move permanently. If they didn’t, there’d be no film at all (there’s not much of one, as it is) but Sachs and Zacharias don’t supply reasons for the move. It isn’t mentioned whether Brian and Kathy rent or own their home in Manhattan; there’s no suggestion that or how Brooklyn is better for Kathy’s work or Brian’s auditions or Jake’s schooling. (In fact, he doesn’t change school, unless a teacher at his old one changes with him – see below.) The terms of Max’s will are no less puzzling. Audrey, pressing Brian to evict his tenant, reminds her brother that, whereas he’s inherited the Brooklyn house, she (Audrey) has nothing. Later on, Brian explains to Jake that his grandfather left the property to both his children. How was it that Audrey, evidently a tougher cookie than her painfully nice brother, didn’t insist on the matter of Leonor’s rent being resolved before Brian took possession of the rest of the place? Jake’s and Tony’s refusal to speak to their parents is similarly necessary and incredible. It’s the only way that Ira Sachs can delay the boys’ discovery of what’s going and the consequences of that discovery – which provide the movie’s climax and conclusion. In a particularly feeble episode in Little Men, Jake and Tony accompany Kathy to Brian’s first night: he’s playing Trigorin in a not-for-profit production of The Seagull. The kids must have nodded rather than shaken their heads to indicate willingness to go to the theatre: we seem meant to think their attendance makes sense because Tony’s ambition is to be an actor but it doesn’t make sense set against the continuing feud with the parents. The boys’ turning out for the play is required simply in order that, when they keep their mouths firmly shut in the car journey back, Brian can launch a furious it’s-tough-for-grown-ups-too outburst from the driver’s seat.
It comes as no surprise that Sachs and Zacharias often don’t bother to follow up on individual scenes. Once these have made an instant impact, they’ve served their purpose and can be forgotten about. The opening sequence is in a schoolroom, in which Jake and a couple of other kids sit quietly but most of the class are tearing round yelling, until the teacher arrives and angrily shuts them up. Jake gets picked up from school by a woman who appears to be the Jardines’ home help; she tells him both his parents will be back late. When he gets home, Jake answers the phone. A male voice explains that he’s an old friend of Jake’s grandfather, is sorry for the family’s loss, wonders when Max’s funeral will be taking place. It’s news to Jake that his grandfather has died; stunned, he hands the phone to the home help. Are we meant to think that his parents already knew about Max’s death but neither a psychotherapist nor an often resting actor could get home to put their son in the picture? Or don’t Brian or Kathy know either? In which case, how come the man on the phone already does? There’s a later sequence involving the schoolteacher and the class of what had seemed to be delinquents at the start: they now listen attentively to what the teacher has to say about Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’. He asks them to write, for homework, a poem about someone they love. Why don’t we get an idea of what Jakes writes for this assignment?
If Ira Sachs doesn’t think any of the above questions matters, here’s another one. Why does he bother even including these scenes, except to pad out his meagre movie? (Its best feature is that it lasts only eighty-five minutes.) The title presumably refers not only to the two teenagers but also to Brian. Whether the epithet in his case is an expression of contempt or protectiveness on Sachs’ part is debatable: the effect of the ‘little’ is condescending in either case. The last time he starred in a ‘Little …’ film, Greg Kinnear was excellent. In Little Miss Sunshine, he played an apparently confident motivational speaker who was revealed to be a loser and then as not so much a loser after all. In Little Men, Kinnear is unimaginative casting. This actor radiates conscientious decency; the man he’s playing is oppressed by a sense of failure from the start and stays that way. Kinnear works hard but he’s expected – especially with two kids in leading roles – to shoulder too much. His best moments come in the early funeral scenes – shaking hands with Leonor, thanking a row of guests for coming, weeping privately. Jennifer Ehle, as usual, looks to be acting for the sake of it: to be fair to her (for a change), it’s not her fault this time – the role of Kathy is feebly underwritten. We get no sense of the relationship between her and Brian. Paulina García holds the camera. In fact, she’s rather too strong a presence: Leonor becomes almost sinister. García, without the glasses she wore in most of Gloria, has tired eyes but they still look as if they might turn Greg Kinnear to stone. Alfred Molina makes a brief appearance as a character called Hernán. I’d no idea who he was meant to be, other than someone Leonor knew and whom she could speak Spanish with.
Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri have been cast for looks that emphasise the chalk and cheese that Jake and Tony are written as. One’s a WASP; the other’s Hispanic. Tony is extrovert – talkative, physically confident, easy in a group. Jake is introverted – a reticent, shy loner until he pals up with Tony. Both friends want to go to LaGuardia high school – Tony to study acting, Jake to do art. Jake is considered effeminate by other kids; Tony gets into a (crudely staged) fight with a boy who casts aspersions on Jake’s – and, by implication, Tony’s – masculinity. The differences between the young actors are a bit less neat. Theo Taplitz is, for the most part, obviously acting and not particularly expressive. Michael Barbieri certainly livens things up: he really enjoys himself in an acting-class exercise – a shouting confrontation between Tony and his drama teacher (Mauricio Bustamente). I wasn’t sure if Barbieri meant to come across throughout as doing an impression of a junior Brooklyn-Latino method actor but at least this is consistent with Tony’s character (he reminds Jake that Al Pacino went to LaGuardia). In the film’s epilogue, Jake is in a party of youngsters sketching at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He sees Tony, also in a school party, on the other side of the gallery. Tony, who doesn’t see Jake, appears unchanged from before, both in age and in school uniform. Jake, by contrast, no longer wears uniform and has his hair in a pony tail; his face looks older too. I assume we’re meant to think that Jake is now at LaGuardia whereas poor (in both senses of the word) Tony hasn’t moved on. But this is a confusing sequence. The camera movement is so deliberate that it’s not a matter of Jake’s catching sight of Tony. It’s more as if he’s imagining Tony might be there – an impression reinforced by the fact that Tony looks the way he always did.
Little Men is just as weak as Love is Strange. Like that film, it’s getting mostly positive reviews. I can only think this is because plenty of critics feel they’re on Ira Sachs’ metropolitan, liberal wavelength and share his warm feelings towards artists (of various kinds), educators and so on. I do too; in principle, I’m all for film-makers who resist thoroughly and easily condemning characters; and I’m naturally drawn to apparently small-scale drama that’s penetrating. But feeling this kind of sympathy obviously doesn’t validate the actual film, and the humanity in Sachs’ movies is as automatic as – and much less witty than – the misanthropy of writer-directors like the Coen brothers and Todd Solondz. It’s typical of the praise lavished on Little Men that Philip Kemp in Sight & Sound (October 2016) sees ‘The nod to Chekhov … [as making] perfect sense: nuance and understatement rule, and what’s not said most of the time is as significant as what is’. For Kemp, making use of Chekhov is enough to merit comparison with Chekhov; in fact, it merely emphasises the gulf between him and Ira Sachs. Sam Adams’ review for The Wrap probably isn’t the only one to describe Little Men as ‘deceptively slight’. The film is slight, and that’s putting it kindly. The deceptive quality comes in fooling people – perhaps including Sachs himself – into thinking it’s more than that.
18 September 2016
