The Sach Download Movies
Itaete Chambers
Feeling fatigued by summer movie season's emphasis on loud and flashy but ultimately empty spectacles? You're in luck. Little Men, now playing in limited release, is the perfect antidote: quiet but insightful, memorable and substantive. It's not a spectacle by any means but you should still see it inside the movie theater because it's the kind of careful storytelling that benefits from being fully inside of it. Getting lost in a story is much easier to accomplish in the pages of a great novel or the dark of a movie theater than if you wait around to Netflix and chill. The movie comes to us from one of our best LGBT directors, Ira Sachs. The New York based writer/director made his feature debut 20 years ago with The Delta (1996) but recently he's been on quite a roll.
Little Men is not an adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott sequel to Little Women, but it does feel like a rich unexpected sequel to a more contemporary future classic. Ira Sach's last film was the moving gay seniors drama Love is Strange starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina whose marriage at the beginning of the film sets off a surprising chain of events which leaves them homeless and at the mercy of friends and relatives. That beautiful movie ended, rather intuitively, with a wordless and narratively inconsequential scene in which we followed their young nephew on his skateboard down the streets of the city at magic hour. The image was rapturous and watery... or rather just rapturous; I was watching it through cascading tears was all. [More...]
It's somehow perfect that Sachs followed that coda, at least emotionally, into a whole new movie that revisits the same plot catalyst (real estate and financial troubles disrupting heretofore steady lives) with young boys at the center this time around.
Jake and Tony (Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri, wonderfully natural first time movie actors) meet when Jake's parents (Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle) inherit and move into a Brooklyn apartment building that belonged to Jake's grandfather. A tiny storefront below the apartment is the livelihood of Tony's mom (Paulina Garcia, the brilliant Chilean actress some will recognize from the arthouse hit Gloria), who was a longtime friend of the recently deceased. Jake and Tony hit it off immediately, despite being nothing a like, but their parents are at odds from the start. The wedge between them? Why it's money of course. The sordid topic of coin.
It's often alarming when movies talk about finances in any relatable way but surely that's because the subject remains taboo in entertainment beyond super broad strokes. The plot details of Little Men are occassionally maddening, primarily because they feel authentic - you can see social disaster and tense adult standoffs coming but can do nothing to prevent them. You want nothing more than to see Jake, a sensitive lonely boy whose parents obviously think is going to be gay (though the subject is not explicitly addressed) and Tony, more of an extrovert guy's guy, grow up together as unlikely best friends pursuing their dreams; Jake wants to be an artist and Tony an actor, their artistic ambitions their only noticeable similarity.
Fair warning: the movie is so truthfully observed and sensitive that it's likely to bring back a flood of emotional memories of your own childhood even if your circumstances were wildly different, especially if you're a gay man who once had an intense and loyal early adolescent friendship with a straight boy, or you're any kind of person who remembers that inexplicably painful sting when young friendships felt threatened by inexplicable (at the time) adult interference.
Little Men wraps up in just an hour and a half, the perfect length for movies and, not coincidentally, the length of a dream cycle. But Little Men is better than dreamy, it's real. I'll wrap up quickly, too. If you haven't yet been fully convinced that Ira Sachs has become of our most important chroniclers of contemporary urban life, run to this third consecutive increasingly persuasive argument to that affect. After the addiction drama Keep the Lights On (wildly acclaimed by most critics, though I confess I was a holdout), the touching senior citizen romance Love is Strange (raved right here) and this new poignantly observed gem (less explicitly an LGBT film than his other movies, but still beautifully inclusive) it's safe to say that the New York filmmaker, who recently turned fifty, is in the midst of his peak storytelling years. Do not miss out on them.
Grade: B+/A-
MVP: Ira Sachs since the ensemble is so strong across the board
Oscar Chances: If it couldn't happen for Love is Strange, which was surely more accessible to Oscar voters (who've shown an historic disinterest in films about adolescence), it's a long shot. But the Independent Spirit Awards would be insane to pass it by.
This movie did not connect with me as much as I thought it would. The performances by both young leads so often felt forced, and the direction felt heavyhanded for as subtle a script. Paulina Garcia felt like she was Bette Davis-style cigarette smoking her way through every scene, and Greg Kinnear didn't register most of his reactions. Jennifer Ehle was goods, though her role was minimal. Also, dialogue felt so choppy and unnatural, which I didn't find to be the case in Sach's previous movies. It wasn't a bad movie, but like Midnight Special, this one felt like it missed the mark.
I absolutely loved that movie. First Ira Sachs that I completely fell in love with. For some reason I could not shake off Jennifer Ehle in that last scene of hers. You never see her face but she is so so moving. This is a beautiful film
Ira Sach's latest film Little Men begins in a chaotic classroom with a mousy boy in the eye of the maelstrom. The boy, eighth-grader Jake Jardine, is intent on his drawing, an abstract scene of yellow stars sitting in a green sky. After scaring the children back into their seats, his teacher shuffles down the aisle and looks over his shoulder, offering a comment about the improbability of such a skyscape. As early on as the opening scene, the film hints at the ways in which adults seem to fail children, and thus force them to mature.
Ira Sachs, whose MOMA mid-career retrospective just finished up last week, has built a career on examining gay relationships and social issues, often with the nuance of city life. He pays attention to the shadowy details like an expert photographer would, careful not to overexpose the subtleties.
In his most recent effort, he's shifted his focus further down the age spectrum. The film examines burgeoning friendship between two young teenage boys amidst a class dispute. To him, the film is partially about the cocktail of emotions that can embitter this time of rapid growth and learning.
"I really love movies about childhood," he explains. "I think there's something inherently cinematic about that time. I feel like there's a lot of childhood that's vivid and very serious, as well as being joyous."
Little Men begins to unfold as a melodrama should, when the death of Jake's grandfather sees his family moving to Brooklyn to live in the brownstone he left behind. Following the wake, they meet the downstairs dress shop owner Leonor and her preteen son Tony. Leonor had been close to Jake's grandfather and was paying a rent far cheaper than what the developing neighborhood would demand of a tenant, causing conflict for Jake's father Brian as he is left to adjust her lease.
Sachs explains that the film's central conflict was one directly witnessed by his cowriter Mauricio Zacharias, whose family had a store in Rio and had to begin evicting a tenant who failed to pay rent.
"I thought this is very dramatic, and it's also clear to me that there are two sides to the story: there's the person who owns the building and the person who's trying to hold onto her store," Sachs explains about the muddled nature of the film's generational and economic conflict. "The question of how people hold onto their homes and the challenges they face in doing so is universal and timeless."
The film never resorts to sensation for its emotional power. Instead, it relies on the way young Jake and Tony navigate the quieter moments surrounding a conflict bigger than themselves and their parents. The issue of gentrification is wholly there, but Little Men examines it in a fashion with less of an eye to its systemic properties and more focus on how it plays out in individual agreements.
Sachs thought that the commentary would ring true for New York and dozens of other American cities, but he was interested more in the humanistic battlefield that this issue is fought on. "[I try to] find a good story that I feel really feel is resonant on a number of different levels to an audience and can bring up a lot of things that are of this moment and our lives, but my focus is really on the story and the characters. That's what I try to be attentive to."
His film is one that peels back the layers of the dispute over rent-raising and grandfather Jardine's last wishes into the parent-child divide that forms and the realizations these boundaries create. It's the quiet scenes of the boys scootering and rollerblading through the neighborhood, attending a community acting class, and encountering the tiny disappointments of the day-to-day that coalesce into the film's emotional weight. Jake learns that his father hasn't lived up to his goals as an actor, and listens to his sermon on how throwing away his drawings could teach him about impermanence. Tony speaks of his father in Angola, how he never sees him but occasionally receives gifts in the mail.
Both want to attend LaGuardia High School to study the arts, and offscreen they prepare their applications during their vow of silence against their parents, as the rent dispute begins to boil over. Their friendship is forged across difference, and strengthened by their shared coming-to-terms with the imperfection and humanity of their caregivers. Just on the cusp of their teenage years, it's a Salinger-esque loss of innocence that they foster amongst shared observations of their parents. Little Men seems to create two divergent worlds of experience, with neither generation recognizing the other's motivations and actions.
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