By Sandra Hall
LITTLE MEN
★★★★
Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri put in remarkable performances as Jake and Tony in Little Men.
PG, 85 minutes. Now showing
Director Ira Sachs
Stars Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle, Theo Taplitz, Pauline Garcia, Michael Barbieri.
New York director Ira Sachs makes films about marriage, parenthood and real estate. His last feature, Love is Strange, was the story of two gay men whose marriage, late in life, causes one to lose his job and, as a result, the apartment the pair have shared for years. His latest, Little Men, centres on a rental property responsible for causing a rift between the families of two teenage boys who have inconveniently become fast friends.
Switch the setting to Sydney and you wouldn't have to change another thing.
The story actually takes place in an ordinary but upwardly mobile Brooklyn neighbourhood. It's here that Bruce (Greg Kinnear) and his sister, Audrey (Talia Balsam), who has an eye on the main chance, take possession of a building left to them by their father.
It's agreed that Bruce, who keeps up a sporadic career as an actor, and his wife, Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), a psychotherapist, will move into the upstairs apartment with their 13 year-old, Jake (Theo Taplitz) but Audrey insists that they triple the rent paid by Leonor (Pauline Garcia), the dressmaker who runs the shop downstairs.
The mere appearance of Kinnear is enough to herald trouble. He's an actor made for anxiety. His boyish looks are so totally at odds with his wrinkled brow, the pouches under his eyes and his air of polite regret that you fancy he'd be amazed if things did turn out well. Yet it's he, not the calm, capable Kathy or the bossy Audrey who takes charge of negotiations.
And Leonor is in no mood for them – or him. She's convinced that the friendship between her and his father entitles her to stay on at the same rent.
Sachs is wise enough not to place their increasingly rancorous exchanges in the centre of the frame. What engages him most is the boys' friendship. Jake is a dreamy introvert with long hair, a lanky frame and a prodigious talent for drawing. He doesn't make friends easily, so when Leonor's son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), takes him up, bolstering him with his cheery optimism and outgoing attitude, it means a lot. They can both go to the local performing arts school, they decide. Tony will act, Jake study art.
Sachs offers no fast track to a happy ending. He doesn't believe in speed. The film's rhythms are set to the leisurely, contemplative pace that Jake adopts as he skateboards around the streets and parks in the film's wealth of travelling shots. And Sachs is also a realist. He gives us a delicately told moral tale but there's a hard and unpalatable nugget of truth at its centre: never under-estimate the power of the real estate market.