There’s a moment early on in LITTLE MEN where, following his father Max’s death, Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear) takes black rubbish sacks full of funeral party detritus down to the basement of the Brooklyn apartment he’s about to inherit. On the ground floor, below the apartment, is a dress shop run by Chilean immigrant Leonor Calvelli (Paulina Garcia). A friend as well as a tenant, Leonor appears at the door with an ornate cake, incongruous among the funeral meats. In a standard Hollywood culture-clash comedy, Brian would be caught throwing out the unwanted cake with the rest of the trash, either by Leonor or her fatherless teenage son Tony (Michael Barbieri). But this isn’t writer-director Ira Sachs’s game: instead, just out of vision, Brian breaks down as he puts the sacks in the bin.
Cocky, streetwise Tony soon makes friends with Jake (Theo Taplitz) the shy son of Brian and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) and soon they’re scooting and roller-blading around Brooklyn together, through streets unfamiliar to Jake, so recently uprooted from his previous home in Manhattan. Inheriting a much-larger apartment was a godsend to his father Brian (a struggling actor now obliged to play off-off-off Broadway in Chekhov) and mother Kathy, a psychotherapist whose salary has been supporting the family. But Kathy’s supposed expertise in conflict resolution is put to the test when Brian’s sister Audrey, who co-inherited the property with Brian, demands that Leonor should pay the market rent to stay in the shop. This Leonor patently can’t afford, and she appeals to Brian: hinting that she may have been more than just a friend to the late Max, but at any rate was someone he could rely on in the absence of regular visits from his own family.
… they’re only dimly aware of the storm gathering over their heads …
Meanwhile, tension among the grown-ups has been mounting, albeit in civilised settings, at a barbecue or in the dress shop; and Jake and Tony have become inseparable. Both have ambitious plans for their futures at the LaGuardia High School for Performing Arts, back in Manhattan: Jake as an artist and Tony as an actor, despite the uninspiring example set by Brian (and there is already about Tony the doomed sense of an also-ran, one of the failed kids from FAME). But as the two young men confront adolescence head-on, they’re only dimly aware of the storm gathering over their heads.
When it breaks, it’s cataclysmic for both families, but again Ira Sachs eschews melodrama in favour of a beautifully underplayed sense of life taking its complicated course. The most overtly dramatic scenes are the drive home from Brian’s first night in The Seagull, and Jake falling off his blades unseen as he skates below the Brooklyn Bridge. The appearance of Alfred Molina as a mysterious and slightly sinister friend of Leonor’s, as she agonises over her future, threatens an ugly outcome – but again, expectations are confounded, the only violence being of the tongue as Leonor succinctly demolishes Brian’s life and so-called career.
“Pitch-perfect” has become a lazy expression to describe actors’ performances, but it would be hard to better them here, and Sachs has given his whole cast the chance to shine as human characters trapped by circumstance (Chekhov can be no accidental reference). Taplitz and Barbieri are wonderfully contrasted as they go through set-piece scenes at high school, the disco and the art gallery, punctuated by their flight along the streets of Brooklyn. Though clearly shot on a low budget, cinematographer Oscar Duran gets every ounce of juice out of his locations, and the dozens of “Associate Producers” mentioned in the credits (suggesting “angels” or crowd-funding) must be pleased to see so much return on their investment – if only emotional.
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