Little Men review – five-star foray into money worries

This painful, complex, beautifully acted and inexpressibly sad drama from Ira Sachs is about something that looms large in real life, but never usually gets acknowledged in the movies in any but the vaguest way – banal, undignified embarrassment over money, and the deadly serious damage this causes.

This film is very different from the general run of ingratiating middlebrow indies that pop up on screen periodically, drenched with implausibility, sentimentality and lame bet-hedging humour. Like his previous film Love Is Strange, Sachs’s Little Men is composed with scrupulous observational intelligence and care. It is really engaging.

This is a film about what gentrification means in real terms, and it reminded me of Laurence Fishburne’s speech on this subject from John Singleton’s 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood: that gentrification is a hostile act, an exploitation of communities, and something to be resisted. Yet the exploiters, the incomers, can be decent people with agonisingly good intentions, muddled by suspicions and difficult, almost feudal loyalties of their own.

Greg Kinnear plays Brian, a struggling New York actor; the breadwinner is his wife Kathy, played by Jennifer Ehle; their sensitive teenage son Jake (Theo Taplitz) wants to be an artist. When Brian’s dad dies, the family’s money worries appear to be over: he has left Brian a large, handsome apartment in upwardly mobile Brooklyn – at present, they have a cramped place in Manhattan. The apartment comes with a sitting tenant: downstairs is a dress shop, which has been there for years, run by the harassed and hardworking Leonor (Paulina García). Brian is now entitled to the rental income, though his soppy old dad charged Leonor only a fraction of the market rate, and her lease is now up for renewal.

Brian’s only job at the moment is a part in a profit-share production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, he realises that his career can only go downhill from here and he needs money. Increasing Leonora’s rent is a very obvious way to secure his financial future, and he is in any case under pressure to do so from his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam), herself entitled to half this rent, and with money issues of her own. So Brian – liberal, well-meaning and self-pitying – is steeling himself for this horrifically difficult conversation with his neighbour when he realises that his lonely son has become best friends with Leonor’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri), a wannabe actor, and so he actually owes Leonor and her family a very important debt.

It is a kind of nightmare, and another kind of movie might want to escalate this situation generically into broad satirical comedy or psychological horror. But Sachs keeps it rigorously at the level of embarrassing real life, and the characterisation and narrative developments are not forced on us; we are kept a step away, with scenes that do not appear at first to have obvious narrative relevance, like Tony’s drama improv class.

Sachs and his screenwriting partner Mauricio Zacharias show all the ways in which confrontation causes everyone to overplay their hand and put themselves in the wrong. Feeling understandably cornered by Brian and Kathy’s casual visits – they want, after all, nothing other than to increase her rent threefold – Leonor becomes coldly angry, pointing out to Brian that she had a real friendship with his late father, clumsily claiming that she knew him better than Brian. Later, Brian overreacts to what he perceives as Tony’s ill manners, and this grown man makes a petulant outburst that is a wince-making misjudgment.

Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz give truly outstanding performances as Tony and Jake: a delicate, nuanced friendship – Tony is bold, confident, charming and humorous, the extrovert to Jake’s introvert. In a way it is like first love, and the film suggests that this might be something more than friendship, but probably isn’t, and there are in any case no cliches and no stereotypes. Tony and Jake might under other circumstances occupy the entire space of the film: it could have been a kind of platonic version of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, and there is a kind of understated, almost subliminal gay sensibility to the film that is a part of its shrewdness and emotional acuity.

Yet Jake and Tony’s lives are balanced with those of their parents. Their final scene has something desperately sad: it is where the film achieves a strangely literary quality, like an exceptionally powerful short story. Film-making this intelligent is such a treat.