“Little Men” is the highly underrated Ira Sachs’ finest movie to date and one of the year’s best movies. It was greeted with rave reviews this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, and the reception was well-deserved. Theo Taplitz as Jake Jardine and Michael Barbieri as Tony Calvelli are the titular best friends whose bond gets tested by a shop-lease battle between both kids’ parents. Gentrification is occurring in the Brooklyn neighborhood in which they live, and a single mother who runs her own business is getting the boot. This subtle, nuanced character study recalls the very best of 1970s European cinema, yet it has its own vision. It’s a delicate, extraordinarily simple story — a slice of life, with a neorealist feel. And in a summer of blockbuster disappointments, “Little Men” is like a breath of fresh air.
READ MORE: Ira Sachs’ ‘Little Men’ Displays A Rare Understanding Of How The World Works [Review]
“I hope this film will give younger people an intro to what is a different kind of cinema than what they’re seeing in all those Marvel movies,” Sachs said.
In “Little Men,” Jake’s father Brian’s (impeccably played by Greg Kinnear) dad passes away, and he is left taking over his father’s apartment, which includes a downstairs shop where Tony’s mother Leonor (Paulina García) works as a seamstress. While Kinnear’s dad was alive, she was being charged the bare minimum for rent, but with Brian now managing the property, a rent increase and possible eviction are on the table. Jake and Tony end up being the after-effects of the territorial war, the effects the dispute has on them offering a poignant indication of what happens when the complications of gentrification comes into the neighborhood. They take part in a scenery that is almost toxic and threatening to their newfound friendship.
Speaking to Sachs on the phone, he explains the stakes the film is built on. “There are these challenges and fights over space happening everywhere; it’s both a political and dramatic situation. It brings out questions about class. These types of situations don’t just exist in New York; they exist in every community. There are distinctions in how neighborhoods are formed, so this is sort of where the story came from.”
Sachs’ smart and impressive films, such as “Love Is Strange” and “Keep the Lights On,” have always carried a gentle quality, and thus it’s no surprise then that he was influenced to make “Little Men” after watching a couple of Yasujiro Ozu films. “There is an element of suspense to the film, but I really started out wanting to make a film about childhood. That’s where Ozu came in, specifically two movies he made in the ’30s and the [’50s]: ‘I Was Born, But…‘ and ‘Good Morning.’ Both films are about kids who go on strike against their parents, they don’t talk,” he says. “We thought that if the two kids in ‘Little Men’ stopped talking to their mom and dad as a form of protest, it would allow a lot of other things to become part of the story.”
Taplitz and Barbieri carry the film, and their performances contain a naturalism that is stunning. “This is their film debut,” Sachs proudly says. “They were 12 and 13 when we shot the film, and now they’re 13 and 14.”
However, more than just a film about adolescent protest and the harsh realities of gentrification, Sachs had another observation about the film’s central relationship that he wanted to explore.
“I actually mentioned this to someone just a couple of minutes ago. There has always been something unique about childhood friendships: They are pre-sexual and yet they are romantic. Tony and Jake are certainly entangled in a kind of romantic friendship,” Sachs explains. “I was at a screening of the film the other day and at the Q&A, I asked the audience who in the room could remember this one friendship that got away, and a majority of the audience raised their hands. Everyone has had that friendship that was lost once adulthood happened. It’s just a theme or topic that resonates with the majority of people.
“There is personal experience in there,” Sachs elaborated, “especially since I was too a young gay kid, who was artistic and felt somewhat out of tune with masculinity.”
With “Little Men,” many are seeing this new film as the completion of Sachs’ “New York trilogy” which started with “Keep The Lights On” and “Love Is Strange,” but the director may not be done with the city just yet. “I wouldn’t put it past me to make it a [quadrilogy]. I am just generally interested in things that I know more than others and New York is one of those things. I live there, I know the intimate aspect of the city. But it’s not just New York; it’s also that these three films were about two males, each of them from different generations.”
Here’s hoping for more, but for now, see “Little Men,” which opens in limited release today.