In 2014’s Love Is Strange, Ira Sachs surveyed the changing landscape of modern New York through a story built around a collision between the private and the public, with real-estate troubles and personal crisis disrupting the long-delayed legal union of an older gay couple. Echoing the melancholy divisions of Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow and Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the film split up its two central characters, then used their separation as its primary source of tension, placing various obstacles—from bureaucratic indifference to the callous impatience of their well-meaning but ultimately short-tempered families—in between them. Flipping the age bracket but maintaining similar socioeconomic concerns, Little Men is another minutely-focused modern parable, this time digging into the quieter effects of neighborhood gentrification, charting the eddies of change and transformation that surround the union of two new pals. The unlikely camaraderie sprouts up between introverted Manhattanite Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) and the confident, obstreperous Tony Calvelli (Michael Barbieri), who develop a fast friendship after moves to Brooklyn. Strained for cash, the Jardines take up residence in the apartment of Jake’s newly-deceased grandfather, who for years has acted as the benevolent landlord to the Calvelli family’s dress shop.
As with Love Is Strange, one definitive change sets off a network of smaller ones. Family patriarch Brian (Greg Kinnear) is a middling actor struggling to find well-paying work, currently biding his time in an Off-Broadway production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) is a therapist whose private practice keeps the family afloat. Their moderate privilege, however, clashes with the comparable deprivation of Leonor (Paulina García, seen recently in the title role of Sebastian Lelio’sGloria) a Chilean immigrant maintaining a small-time, old-fashioned boutique, which has managed to stay afloat mostly thanks to the kindness of Brian’s father, who hadn’t raised their rent in years. With the children now in charge of the estate, Brian gradually cedes to the urgings of sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) to make the property profitable, scaling up the shop’s new lease to suit the gentrifying neighborhood.
This is a potentially rich setup, encapsulating a variety of intersecting class divisions and many of the problems currently occupying New York, where middle and lower class citizens are being pushed to the margins, driven out of their homes by an increasingly stratospheric rental market. Yet just as Love Is Strange muffled its prospective emotional effect through dramatic hysterics (treating a move out of Manhattan as some monstrous form of exile) and a shortage of sympathetic characters (extended family members as shrieking ingrates seemingly incapable of personal sacrifice), Little Men undercuts its concept through a few key narrative shortcuts. While the passages involving the two young boys are remarkably solid, there’s otherwise too much focus on the psychic pains of landlord-ship, of privilege as a burden, and not enough on the truly struggling characters languishing at the story’s fringes.
It’s telling that, despite being tossed a few scenes here and there to establish dramatic credibility, the Chilean family takes a definite backseat to the Jardines, each of whom is granted a full-fledged conflict to explore. This treatment extends to the children, and while both young actors turn in charming, charismatic performances, they’re ultimately hampered by their symbolic status. This quality is especially present in the character of Tony, who carries around a coarse, old-school Brooklyn accent that’s laughable considering the film’s modern realistic context. It’s a small detail, but the choice of making an adolescent child of immigrants yammer like an extra from a ‘50s gangster movie tellingly indicates his blunt status as a marker of Outer Boroughs authenticity, one that, while well-meaning in its efforts to humanize this conflict, is more than a bit clumsy in doing so.
Despite its poignant depiction of the progression from the boundless possibilities of summer to an aching autumnal melancholy, Little Men stands up unfavorably to the work of a director like Ozu, to which it compares itself via a parallel story structure. The Japanese master was able to tell a small-scale tale of change with unrivaled benevolence and clarity, without falling victim to short-changing any of the characters involved in this complex roundelay, or clearly marking out any as de facto bad guys. Leonor may be humanized, at least enough to give the story serious heft, but there’s never any question who’s at fault in this rent battle scenario, her haughty, supercilious manner and repeated questioning of Brian’s manhood setting her up more as a psychic reflection of privileged angst than an actual character. Treatment like this draws further attention to Tony’s status as a dramatic mirror for Jake, a rough-edged rustic who helps point him toward the establishment of his mature adult self. Its small inter-family drama scuffed up a bit by its reliance on lazy shorthand tropes, Sachs film stands as another reminder that, while there’s definite value in telling these kinds of stories, it’s difficult to do so without getting tripped up by their inherent complexities.
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