Obsession and guilt
are what make detective stories interesting. In a time where America is
struggling to define the purpose of police in the context of institutionalized
racism, a film about possibly corrupt police hunting a serial killer initially
appears yawn inducing, perhaps even eye rolling. However, beyond an unusually
glacial character piece, made possible by a trifecta of powerful performances,
John Lee Hancock's (The Blindside) the little things is an
absolute clinic on the inability to let things go.
Detectives, social workers, teachers, and healthcare professionals have all
encountered darkness at some point in their careers. There are mysteries
that, no matter how hard the investigator tries, may never be solved and worse,
the ramifications of the crime may never be resolved. At first glance it
may seem easy to dismiss this patient rumination on crime and duty as a SE7EN
clone. Upon further examination, this film shares more of its DNA with
Sean Penn's masterwork The Pledge. The story focuses on a
disgraced former LA detective who teams with his youthful replacement to hunt a
serial killer who may have been haunting the veteran for years. The story
is simple, with intent. Hancock is more interested in the characters and
world rather than action and the film is all the better for it.
The human race has
been mutually traumatized over the last year. It's fitting that
this film, written in 1993, would come to fruition just as the light begins to
appear at the end of the COVID tunnel. At the center of the story is Denzel
Washington's scarred and broken Deke. His tragic, Shakespearean
background is doled out throughout the film’s overlong running time, but it is
his present that is of the most import. His youthful counterpart is Det.
Baxter, played with intellectual ferocity by Rami Malek. Their dynamic is
the core, two men at opposite ends of their careers who are brought together by
the instinctual drive to make things right. One of the best aspects is in
how Deke's loneliness doesn't destroy him with vice, it defines him with
purpose. Ghosts haunt him at every turn, as he speaks to the dead begging
for answers that will never come, while Malek’s Baxter tries to balance family
and a sense of right in a world gone wrong. This is the genius of
Hancock's script, for anyone who's ever left something undone, this story is
intoxicating, promising redemption and comeuppance while slowly encasing the
viewer in an elaborate trap born from trauma, setback, and shame.
These demons are personified in Jared Leto's Sparma, the quarry that
the police are hunting. In what is the performance of his career, Leto
conjures dime store Manson, a millennial villain whose eccentricities and
nonchalant malice adhere to the subconscious like gum under a theater
chair. He's soiled, aloof, and possibly the smartest opponent either of
the heroes have faced, leading to an unorthodox cat and mouse game without speed,
flash, or gunfights. Hancock is almost too reserved, forcing the
character flaws, illusions, and false flags to the fore, commanding the viewer
to simply, endure, to experience. The finale is a quiet, yet devastating
affair in which everything and nothing are combined and destroyed, releasing
the shared nightmares and dreams of the trio into the ether, a choice that will
either rebuke or endear.
Longtime collaborator
John Schwartzman's cinematography is astounding. While his trademark eye
for close quarters mayhem is absent, it is the humane underpinnings of his work
on Jurassic World that comes to mind. This is a small,
whisper of a story and when juxtaposed with a colossal tale such as World,
it’s the marriage of the two that makes this work. The world outside the
city, outside the crime scenes and morgues is huge, limitless, and
beautiful. Within the confines of LA however, the sewage begins to seep
from every tear in the pristine veneer, a biproduct of moral concession
that consumes all of the characters, creating an inescapable purgatory in which
nothing makes sense anymore beyond the personal code of the two crusaders, both
of which whose compromises may ultimately undo them.
Coming to theaters and HBO Max this Friday, the little things is an
introspective crime thriller that is in no rush to win your affections.
It's an unusual approach to an exhausted genre that when it hits, it
shakes the heavens and when it misses, it peels paint. The end result is
a complex, adult oriented, inverted chamber piece in which the prison is the
mind's eye, full of bad memories and the voices of the dead. A place that
once entered, cannot be escaped, despite best intentions and the understanding
of who the "good guys" are.
--Kyle Jonathan