Ira Sachs’s Little Men is a beautifully acted generational drama, a coming of age, boy’s own story of lost friendship and a pessimistic satire about gentrification – all composed with scrupulous observational care.
Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle play Brian and Kathy, a decent if somewhat self-pitying guy and his wife. Brian is an actor whose career is dying, and when he inherits a property in Brooklyn from his late father there is a chance for some real financial stability. He realises he is within his rights to hike the rent being charged to the woman who has a dress shop in the downstairs apartment.
But the exquisitely painful problem – quite aside from their liberal middle-class embarrassment at needing or wanting to do this – is that the woman’s son has befriended their son, and saved him from loneliness. Brian and Kathy actually owe this woman a lot. But Brian also owes something to his sister, who has her own money worries, and they overwhelmingly feel that they owe themselves a fair bit as well.
It is an agonising anatomy of divided loyalties, made much more poignant and real by the lovely performances of Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz as the two teenagers whose friendship continues alongside, or above, the adults’ undignified wrangling over money. There is something quietly and intimately tragic about how this relationship pans out, and their final scene together is haunting.
