Note: the author of this review watched The little things on a digital screen From home. Before making the decision to see it – or any other film – in the cinema, consider the health risks involved. Here it is an interview on the subject with scientific experts.
“You know, you and I are very similar,” says the suspect to the detective. “In another life, we could have been friends.” The words are spoken without a hint of irony, without blinking, poking or suggesting that the character who speaks them or the actor who is speaking them or the writer who wrote them has any indication that they have been repeated a thousand times before in a thousand films like This one. That’s the way to The little things, a police thriller soaked in the clichés of its kind – the taciturn archetypes on both sides of the law, guilt and obsession, the harsh old harangue – that it often feels like an accidental parody of the withheld jokes. The film is set in 1990, the same year it was written, and if it weren’t for the stylistic tips of a former music video director and his iconic additions to the canon of films about intelligent psychopaths and the workaholic investigators in their wake, if we assume that everyone involved came out of a cryogenic chamber, happily unaware of the past three decades of similar food.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before. A murderer walks the streets of Los Angeles, attacking young women. For the open investigation, a veteran hunter comes in: Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington), years away from his heyday as a major idiot in the LA County Sheriff’s Department, now working on a much quieter raid as a patrol officer about two years ago. and a half hours out of town. Joe is gray and haunted. He has unresolved accounts, demons not due, old cases weighing on his conscience. He talks to corpses like a hill Will Graham, and sees ghosts of those he couldn’t save. So when a routine collection of evidence brings him back to his former jurisdiction, that law enforcement relic finds itself at work again, chasing another killer, even though he’s too old for that shit. Before long, Deke is staying in a run-down Los Angeles motel, muttering to himself in the green-tinged darkness, his flashlight pointed at the evidence he nailed to the wall. Does this count as a restriction on the part of the film the fact that he did not connect each photo to a woolen thread?
Washington, like his character, is back in familiar territory. The Oscar winner went to the police pulp moonlight for part of the real 90s, in a feverish search for bone collectors, body jumping maniacsand virtual reality killers. Insofar as The little things it looks like a continuation of that era, instead of just a shamelessly derivative setback, it’s thanks to the wear and tear of its stellar power – the feeling that we’re watching a worn and damaged version of all the chic sports shoes to which he once lent his magnetism smile and mercury intelligence. Now approaching 70, his hair sprinkled with more salt than pepper, Washington fits the profile of an old professional who resists retirement; his comfort in representing his age, instead of disguising it, makes him the ideal person for this worn-out role. The little things he quickly joins him with a kind of young partner, the Mills for his Somerset: Sergeant Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), warned by his superiors that Deke’s path is exhaustion, problems, perhaps madness. Malek, with his wide-eyed idiosyncrasy, is a less natural choice to play the role of heterosexual “college student”, but he and Washington settle into the dynamic, moldy well, exchanging games for golden old men during an ambush.
The little things it’s pure cliché. There is hardly a moment in the film that does not resemble a dozen predecessors, in form, content, or both. That the supporting cast of second-line officers includes two former students of The Wire provides a sense of procedural vibe that director and writer John Lee Hancock is approaching ingeniously, but inaccurately. Your script is a dizzying and fun stirring of jargon, buzzword and joke. When your characters are not ceaselessly pointing out the biblical dimension of their work – there is a lot of talk of God, church, angels and reverends, plus a significant shot of a cross appearing on a hill like the Hollywood sign – they are arguing over who is buying breakfast. To enjoy the film on your own terms, it depends on finding pleasure, guilty or not, in recycled tropes with totally unmoved conviction. Or perhaps craving comforting food of a variety, Hollywood is not as frequent as before.
Hancock, whose curriculum is heavier on porridge (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) than sand, has the good sense to steal from the best. He lends The little things a sinister glow and ambience that could be described as Designer Imposter David Fincher: all the dirty apartments and underpasses, bathed in shadows and viridescent light. The open suspense chill, a tense encounter with an invisible driver on a lonely stretch of the California highway, makes the influence immediately clear. Occasionally, Fincher’s blatant envy turns into something like genuine pulp poetry: there is a seducer Dragon tattoo flow into the way editor Robert Frazen cuts from a person of interest by throwing a bag of trash with possible incriminating evidence for the eavesdropping Washington policeman taking him away – that feeling of being pulled by the force of the filmmaker’s own investigative fascination. And the highly successful frequent filmmaker, John Schwartzman, does a decent imitation of Robert Elswit, his camera hovering menacingly over the city’s canyons while a predator stalks his next prey.
The shadow of Seven and their countless kittens and mice fall unmistakably The little things. This quality comes to the fore with the introduction of one of the main suspects interpreted, with the maximum of arrogance and exhibitionism, by Jared Leto. His pale, oily skin, his long, oily hair, his sunken eyes in his sockets, Leto evokes Charles Manson long before Helter Skelter appears visibly on the character’s bookshelf. (It’s a playful, subtle performance, even if someone concludes that he and Malek could have easily switched roles.) As guilty as this insulting eccentric may seem, the film revolves around whether our detectives’ certainty about him can be trusted. . Is this guy the culprit or just a freak who’s seen a lot of movies about murderers and the cops behind them? A more honest or self-conscious film about your relentless plagiarism can fill up Shout at this point but The little things he is too sincere to really disregard the conventions to which he slavishly adheres (though sometimes effectively).
There is a touch of Zodiac, also, in Hancock’s Fincher cosplay. At least to a superficial extent, the director embraces ambiguity – especially in the final stretch of the admirably pessimistic film, when a move to the dusty surroundings of the city, bathed in the almost accusatory lighting of the headlights, subverts some expectations about where a plot of these second-hand emotions can go. This final passage makes up for all the mystery surrounding Deke’s troubled past, flirting with a criticism of the type of vehicle Denzel Washington that The little things sequel not officially. In its unexpectedly bleak outcome, the film even threatens to synchronize itself with the spirit of the moment, a massive resistance to hero worship granted to anti-hero lawmen with a faltering consideration of due process. Still, even that element creaks a little with age: Washington, after all, has revealed the dark side of the thin blue line before. And you would have to go back long before 1990 to find a genuinely new thriller in your understanding that, yes, sometimes the detective and his prey are more alike than not.