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Note: the author of this review watched The small things on a digital screener of the House. Before you make the decision to see it – or any other movie – in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here is a meeting on the subject with scientific experts.
“You know, you and I look a lot alike,” the suspect told the detective. “In another life, we could have been friends.” The words are spoken without a hint of irony, without a wink or a nudge or the slightest suggestion that the character speaking them or the actor who delivered them or the writer who wrote them. faintest idea that they’ve been trotted a thousand times before in a thousand movies like this. This is the way to The small things, a crime thriller so steeped in the clichés of its genre – the brooding archetypes on both sides of the law, guilt and obsession, hard-boiled gossip – that it often plays out as an accidental parody with the withheld jokes. The film is set in 1990, the same year it was written, and without the stylistic cues of a former music video director and his iconic additions to the movie canon about intelligent psychopaths and work-packed investigators on their tails, one would assume that everyone involved emerged from a cryogenic chamber, completely ignoring the past three decades of similar tariffs.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A killer roams the streets of Los Angeles, preying on young women. Veteran manhunter Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) strolls into open investigation, years away from his prime as the hot dick of the LA County Sheriff’s Department, now working a much calmer pace. as a patrol assistant some two-and-a-half hour out of town. Joe is grizzled and haunted. He has dozens of unresolved cases, unconquered demons, old cases hanging over his conscience. He talks to corpses like an over-the-hill Will graham, and sees the ghosts of those he couldn’t save. So when a routine evidence-gathering brings him back to his jurisdiction, this law enforcement relic finds himself back at work, chasing another killer even though he’s too old for the shit. Before long, Deke is staying in a seedy LA motel, muttering to himself in the green-tinged darkness, a flashlight on over the evidence he’s nailed to the wall. Does it count as a constraint on the part of the film that it did not connect each photo with a yarn?
Washington, like his character, is back on familiar ground. The Oscar winner lit a police paste in moonlight through part of the real ’90s, in the feverish pursuit of bone collectors, body jumping maniacs, and virtual reality killers. To the extent that The small things feels like a continuation of that era rather than just a shamelessly derivative throwback, it’s thanks to the alteration of its star power – the feeling that we’re looking at a worn and damaged version of every shoe in intelligent erasers to which he lent his smiling magnetism and quicksilver intelligence. Now growing 70 years old, his hair strewn with more salt than pepper, Washington fits the profile of an old pro resisting retirement; her comfort in playing her age, rather than obscuring it, makes her the ideal person for that worn-out role. The small things Quickly twins him with some sort of young partner, the Mills at his Somerset: Rising Sergeant Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), warned by his superiors that Deke’s path lies in exhaustion, trouble, maybe the madness. Malek, with his wide-eyed idiosyncrasy, is a less natural choice to play the straight lace-up ‘college boy’ foil, but he and Washington settle into the musty dynamic pit, exchanging jokes about old gilds at a implantation.
The small things is a pure master key. There’s hardly a moment in the film that doesn’t recall a dozen predecessors, in form or content, or both. That the supporting cast of second-rank officers include two former Thread gives a sense of the procedural vibe that writer-director John Lee Hancock approaches with precision but imprecision. Its script is a flurry of jargon, platitude and panting, awkward joke. When his characters do not endlessly emphasize the biblical dimension of their work – there is a lot of talk about God, the church, angels and reverends, augmented by a significant plane of a cross looming on a hill as the sign from Hollywood – they’re arguing over who buys breakfast. To enjoy the film on its own terms, one has to find pleasure, guilty or not, in recycled tropes with total direct conviction. Or maybe craving for comfort food from a Hollywood variety doesn’t produce as often as it once did.
Hancock, whose CV is heavier on porridge (The blind side, Save Mr. Banks) that guts, has the good sense to steal the best. He lend The small things a gloomy glow and ambience that one could call Designer Imposter David Fincher: all the grubby apartments and underground passages, bathed in shadow and viridescent light. The cold, suspenseful opening, a tense encounter with an invisible driver on a lonely stretch of the California highway, immediately makes the influence obvious. Every now and then Fincher’s blatant envy turns into something like true pulp poetry: there’s an alluring Dragon Tattoos flows to the way editor Robert Frazen cuts from a person of interest dropping a trash bag of potential incriminating evidence to the nosy Washington cop who carries him – that feeling of being dragged down by the force of fascination to investigation of a filmmaker. And successful photographer John Schwartzman does a decent halfway impersonation of Robert Elswit, his camera towering ominously above the city’s canyons as a predator stalks its next prey.
Shadow of Seven and her countless cat and mouse offspring undoubtedly stumble upon The small things. This quality comes to the fore with the introduction of a leading suspect played, with maximum creep arrogance, by Jared Leto. His pale and oily skin, his long and greasy hair, his eyes sunk in their sockets, Leto evokes Charles Manson long before Skelter Hero visibly appears on the character’s library. (It’s a fun, unsubtle performance, though it remains to be concluded that he and Malek could have easily swapped roles.) As guilty as this provocative oddity comes across, the film comes to wonder if the certainty of our detectives about it can be trusted. Is this guy the culprit or just some nutcase who’s seen too many killer movies and cops after them? A film more honest or more aware of its relentless plagiarism could become complete Yell at this point, but The small things is too sincere to thumb his nose at the conventions to which he slavishly (if sometimes indeed) adheres to.
There is a touch of Zodiac, too, in Hancock’s Fincher cosplay. To at least superficial extent, the director embraces the ambiguity – particularly in the film’s admirably downbeat home stretch, when a shift to the dusty outskirts of town, bathed in the almost accusatory lighting of the headlights, subverts some expectations as to the destination of the plot of these second-hand sensations. This latest passage pays for all the mystery surrounding Deke’s troubled past, flirting with vehicle-type critic Denzel Washington who The small things unofficially sequel. In its unexpected and somber result, the film even threatens to synchronize with the spirit of the moment, a mass resistance to hero worship given to anti-hero lawyers with a hesitant respect for due process. Yet even this element creaks a bit with age: Washington, after all, has revealed the dark side of thin blue line before. And you’d have to go back much earlier than 1990 to find a truly novel detective film in its understanding that, yes, sometimes the detective and his career are more alike than not.
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