losing it
by Douglas Messerli
Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias (screenplay), Ira Sachs (director) Little Men / 2016
Through the past decade Ira Sachs has made a movie about
every 2 years (with the exception of five years between Married Life and Keep the
Lights On), each one better, or at least as good, as the one before it. Little Men seems to me to the apotheosis
of his thematic concerns and his quiet, melodramatic style—and I mean that in
the best sense of that word, in the way that one can describe the films of
Douglas Sirk as melodramas, dramas of human feeling.
The specific
issue here, as many critics have noted, is loss, in particular urban loss. What
is being lost in vibrant cities as they become overwhelmingly a space for the
young, predominantly white rich, is the question behind his last two films,
along with the social and personal losses that come along with those changes.
Although Sachs has generally been focused on New York, this new film and his
last, Love Is Strange, might easily
have been filmed in San Francisco, Seattle, or even the more culturally diverse
Los Angeles.
Clearly Brian
Jardine (Greg Kinnear) has had his share of losses: his father has just died as
the movie opens, and as an actor with a once promising career has gone nowhere;
he hardly makes enough money to pay the bills. Although he cannot quite bring
himself to admit it, he is embarrassed by relying on his wife Kathy (Jennifer
Ehle), a psychotherapist, for his small family’s survival. And he probably has
visited his father so little during his life because of that very fact— we
later discover that his father had refused to attend family events because they
were paid for by Kathy, not his son. Sachs reveals all of this in a few seconds
when, taking down the garbage after a low-keyed memorial gathering in their
father’s Brooklyn brownstone, Brian breaks down into sobs. What’s more, he must
face the fact that, as we see in his portrayal of Trigorin in Chekhov’s
The Seagull in an off-off Broadway theater, that he is simply not a
great actor.
Kathy, as the
breadwinner, has lost her youth, and is now losing customers. In short, the
Jardines are in financial duress, and are delighted to leave Manhattan by
moving into the dead father’s brownstone.
The building also
contains a rent-paying dress shop, run by a former Chilean seamstress, Leonor
Calvelli (Paulina García). However, the rent she pays is incredibly low given
the recent gentrification of the neighborhood. Brian’s father, knowing that her
business brought in very little, kept the rent low, and sought out the
strong-willed woman as a friend and confident. Leonor’s husband is seemingly on
a permanent trip to Angola, where we never discover what he is doing—except as
Leonor’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri) imaginatively speculates, he is on an
endless safari. He too, has lost his father, which he admits at first hurt him,
but the fact of which he has now assimilated.
This tiny family
of two suffers the loss of income which might help them to survive. And now
that there is a new landlord, Leonor sniffs out the future like a lioness
determined to protect the only things she has left in her life: her hard work
and her love for her talented son.
At the center of this tale, however, are
the “little men,” the two boys, the Jardines’ son, Jake (Theo Taplitz)—an
introverted, almost speechless young man who wants to be a visual artist—and
Tony, a rather fearless boy who wishes to become an actor in the vein of Al
Pacino or Robert De Niro. They are both 13, and they bond almost immediately
upon encountering one another.
Sachs is careful
not to describe their relationship as having anything to do with sex or real
love, but we only have to watch the soulful stares of Jake upon his new-found
friend, or to see the boys racing through the Brooklyn streets together, Tony
on a foot-scooter and Jake rollerblade skating slightly behind or aside him,
to know that these kids share something special together. If they are
opposites, together they reinforce one another as yin and yang. Both want to be
able to attend the arts school Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School. And both
immediately are beloved by each other’s parents allowing them to share meals
and weekly sleepovers.
If the
fast-talking Tony (in one wonderful scene he even talks down his acting teacher
in a
theater
exercise) also plays sports and is attracted to a girl, we know that the shy
Jake is focused only on Tony and his own art. Sachs says nothing else about the
sexual interests, but knowing boys at their age, it should come of no surprise,
if they might also be exploring one another’s bodies. If nothing else, their
friendship is, at this moment, at the center of their lives. And when a fellow
school mate hints at Jake’s possible homosexuality (“he wears dresses at home,”
taunts the boy), Tony slugs him, receiving a beating in return. These little
men might have become friends for life—if it weren’t for the insensitivity and
class differences of their parents.
Prodded by both
his wife and his obviously greedy sister (Talia Balsam) (“What am I getting out
of this?” she laments), Brian determines to triple Leonor’s rent, a sum she
simply cannot pay. She, in turn, battles him back, refusing to even read his
new rental agreement and goading him with stories from his father’s mouth. She
even advertises for new help. As film critic Sheila O’Malley writes: “She's
terrifying. She's terrified. When she crushes her cigarette out on the
sidewalk, you can picture Brian and Kathy's faces underneath her shoe. She is
not a villain. She is fighting for her life.”
When the little
men awaken from their rapture to realize what is happening, they determine to
enact a kind of passive aggression, both refusing to speak to their parents.
But when it becomes clear that Leonor will be evicted, losing her only
possibility of income, Jake breaks his silence beseeching his parents to change
their tactics.
It is too late,
and regret is all any of these figures have left. In the last scene we see the
painful isolation, once again, of Jake, now sporting a ponytail, on a visit to
an art museum where he is sketching a painting, the traditional way in which
artists hone their own craft. Across the way, he suddenly spots Tony with a
group of other students viewing the art. For a moment he rises to get a better
glimpse, but as Tony moves away with the others, Jake returns to his
floor-bound location, focusing on the only thing he now has left, his art.
The terrible
feeling at the bottom of our stomachs as we leave the theater is that both boys
may have lost, in the severing of their bond, almost everything except their
personal imaginative desires. Will they, like Leonor and Brian, similarly be
failures in their chosen endeavors? That, we can never know. We can only hope
not. Or let me say, we can only believe that they may find the happiness that
has so eluded the bigger men and women around them.
The acting in
this film is as excellent as the direction, and the music by Dickon Hinchliffe
is a delightful counterpoint to the sadness of the film’s subject. This is a
movie I might like to own to be able to see it again and again.
Los Angeles,
October 4, 2016
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (October 2016
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