Shane Meadows (1996)

This one-hour piece, made when Meadows was twenty-three, preceded his first full-length feature Twenty Four Seven by just a year.   It’s hard to see it, at this distance in time, as anything but a piece of juvenilia.  In the same year he made a twelve-minute short called Where’s the Money, Ronnie?  Both that film and Small Time are about gangs of inept crooks and the tone in each case is insecure – this is more of a problem in Small Time because it’s five times longer.  According to his Wikipedia biography, Shane Meadows turned to petty crime shortly after leaving school (at the age of sixteen).  Whether or not he went to prison – which is where Jumbo, the character he plays in Small Time, ends up – he was evidently preoccupied with criminal ways of life when he made these two films but hadn’t yet found a satisfying way of realising that preoccupation on screen.   A few bits of the lawbreaking Jumbo and his mates get up to – in the Sneinton area of Nottingham – are amusing enough but only as comedy sketches; Meadows isn’t able to fuse that side of the material with social insight.

The other main thread of Small Time is the relationships of two couples, in adjoining flats – Jumbo and Ruby (Gena Kawecka), and Jumbo’s mate Malc (Mat Hand) and his girlfriend Kate (Dena Smiles), who have two young kids.  The walls are thin and Malc and Kate (who’s at college and, within the terms of the film, upwardly mobile) can hear the regular arguments between Jumbo and Ruby.  Like his attitude towards crime, Meadows’ feelings about male-female relationships are unresolved (to put it mildly).  The boys are feckless but the girls are naggers or teases so you can’t really blame the boys …  This isn’t a problem in the Malc-Kate part of the story but it is with Ruby, whose happiest moments are spent with a vibrator, and Jumbo, who isn’t above smacking her around.  Meadows’ limitations as an actor – he seems always to be fooling around, self-consciously – actually make Jumbo more disturbing.  You’re almost grateful for the intentionally silly wig Meadows wears, although that becomes a distraction in the occasional sequences of Small Time where he gets some rhythm going in the improvised interactions between characters.

28 December 2010