Ira Sachs, best known for his intimate, humane New York stories, has a fascination with tales of transition, both in the city setting and in the relationships that unfold there. In his last film, Love Is Strange, the spiralling costs of the Manhattan housing market force a gay couple out of their shared home. Now in Little Men, the forces of gentrification are at play again, this time in a rising Brooklyn neighbourhood and this time mirrored in the friendship of a pair of adolescent boys.
Sensitive, artistic introvert Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) and garrulous aspiring actor Tony Calvelli (Michael Barbieri) are themselves at a point of transition: poised on the brink of adulthood, they still – just – retain the gangly uncertainty of children role-playing as grownups. Even the score, a recurring motif of climbing notes, echoes the sense of moving forward, that something is about to change.
The boys’ intense friendship, beautifully played by the two young actors, comes about when Jake and his family move into the building that they inherit from his deceased grandfather. The building also houses the clothes shop of Tony’s mother, Leonor (Paulina Garcia). Jake’s parents (Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle) lack the emotional attachment to the old neighbourhood that led his father to keep the rent low for Leonor; the negotiations on the new contract swiftly go from passive aggression to undisguised savagery. Jake and Tony are collateral damage in this suburban warfare. Sachs’s preoccupation with real estate may be a trifle bourgeois, but the films that result are finely tooled little gems.
