Friday, April 8, 2016

SFF Selections 2015: "Little Men"

Little Men * * * *



     No one writes dialogue like Ira Sachs. A master of understanding the intricacies of human speech, his films observe conversations as though heard from life. Absent of exposition and theatricality, pregnant with sub-text, and brimming over with sentiments unsaid: his words are mine, yours, human. "My parents are married, they just don't live together." says a buoyantly authentic Brooklyn teen. "I don't understand..." responds his sensitive and artistic friend. And "neither do I." comes his pointed and vulnerable reply. These words ring so true because they honestly convey how kids, nay how people speak when un-masked and genuine before one other. The people who speak them are Jake and Tony, the simplistically and earnestly genuine titular Little Men of Sach's latest exploration of interaction in a world filled with those who scheme and posture behind complex defensive facades.

      Jake (a revelatory Theo Taplitz) is a man-in-the-making. A tender artist less concerned with discovering who he really is, he instead conforms to who he feels pressured to be. He is indeed a man-in-the-making, but the man being made isn't really him. With generally well-to do New York liberals for parents (his father a perennially fledgling actor played by a spot-on Greg Kinnear and his mother a well-meaning but supercilious psycho-therapist embodied by Jennifer Ehle) and his long non-traditional hair-cut, Jake isn't immediately recognizable as a repressed or bridled child. But from the coached way he answers the phone ("Jardine residence...") to the out of character manner in which he dresses (he looks like a combination of Little Lord Fauntleroy and an '80s yacht captain at his grandfather's funeral), one perceives that even in their progressive elitism, Jake's parents have ingrained within him a strong sense of who he should be.

     The dichotomy between the person Jake feels he's supposed be and his authentic self is highlighted when he meets the boisterous but sensitive Tony (played in a refreshing and vibrant turn by Michael Barbieri). Before Jake moves into the apartment above Tony's mother's shop, the boys meet after Jake's grandfather's funeral. Tony makes an ungraceful attempt at a condoling remark and Jake immediately tells him what he should say, "I think you're supposed to say 'I'm sorry for your loss.'" Tony parrots back that he's sorry for Jake's loss to which Jake's unfiltered reply is, "Oh, it's ok." Despite the fact that Jake doesn't feel a loss that he needs comfort for, his thinking is so married to the "should" that he feels compelled to impose his conformity onto Tony.

     As the boys' friendship grows, Tony's life stands as a breathing embodiment of the phrase "be true to yourself" in stark contrast to Jake's confined perception of who his is. While Jake's parents' involvement in his life affects and defines him, their regulations drawing the box inside which he sees himself (no video-games on weekdays, no internet before 5:00), Tony's sense of identity is such that he knows his own shape and makes no attempt to reconcile it to fit the size of any box shaped otherwise. And so as Tony's unflinching commitment to simply existing unfettered and as he is begins to pull Jake out of the glove of manufactured persona that he's touched the world through, Tony becomes protective of his friend's newly exposed authenticity. So when kids pick on Jake for his gangly appearance and tender demeanor (calling him "Katy Perry" and even referring to him behind his back as Tony's "boyfriend"), Tony defends Jake to the point of getting in a fight. Tony's mother (brought to life with fear-inspired vitriol by the dynamic Paulina Garcia), upset over her son's black eye, tries to imbue Jake with responsibility for her son's injury, but Tony, not wanting an imparted sense of guilt from his mother to detract from Jake being himself, quickly defuses her statements by writing her off as dramatic -saying, "She deserves an Academy Award!"

     The tragedy, or rather the reality of the story of these Little Men is that they don't exist in a vacuum, but in a world filled with those who scheme and posture behind complex defensive facades. At the film's start, the truest out-put that Jake offers into his world (still blooming un-nourished through the snows of his conformity) is the extension of his heart that is his art-work. Once his family moves in above Tony's mother's shop, Jake asks his father if he's seen his drawings. When it seems as though they've been lost to the move, his father suggests, "Why don't you make new ones?" Jake explains, "Because they won't be like the old ones." Not understanding his son and that this art is part of who he is at his core (an integral, unchanging component of his identity), Jake's father concludes, "It's good to get rid of stuff, to let go."

     Ira Sach's films are chamber pieces, not just about the chambers where we live and abide: our houses and homes, but also the chambers of our minds: where we think and where we wonder, where we internalize and hope, and even the chambers of the heart: such is true of Sach's Little Men. Jake and Tony come to be fixtures in the chambers of one another's homes, they open up the chambers of one another's minds, and they peer into the chambers of one another's hearts, see one another's true heart-beats, and affirm that they are good. The undertaking to embrace their own unique heart-beats is the undertaking of men, and also that which men around them seem to have failed in. The boys' goal to encourage one another to be true to their own heart-beats in the midst of their parents' different and warring goals is perfectly encapsulated in the film's still-framed and placid opening shot: Jake draws in his class-room (a genuine expression of himself) surrounded by the madness and chaos of a paper-ball fight between class-mates. Our hearts can't help but echo the film's first spoken sentiment yelled by that class' teacher when he walks in on the paper-fight as we witness the ongoing battling factions of the film that threaten these boys on their journey... "What is this mess!?"

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