As with all of Einstein’s quotes, you have to take them with a grain of salt. Lots of them are real, some of them fanciful. One quote attributed to him is: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.” It highlights the powerful effect of small changes over a long time.
The film The Little Things (dir. John Lee Hancock) has a lot going for it to start with. It has three Oscar winners; two finely cast, one sort of out of place and not playing to his strengths.
The Little Things is a crime drama where a Deputy Sheriff, Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington), is given a crap job to drive up to LA to retrieve some evidence from another case. While in LA, Deke runs into old cop friends and gets interested in an on-going serial killer case lead by Detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek).
The case has echos of past cases for Deke and he is drawn further and further into the case. First, wanting to find the killer, but also trying to exorcise some of his own demons from his past and the failure to solve the similar case.
Denzel Washington is still amazing. You would watch him read the comment section about kumara growing patterns. He definitely elevates this material. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Rami Malek. He is great in Mr Robot and Bohemian Rhapsody, in both cases, he plays an outsider or a misfit. Here he is asked to play the cool slick lead detective, and it doesn’t really work.
The case progressives forward through Deke’s breakthroughs and the pair stumble upon Albert Sparma (Jared Leto), who does creepy weird loner super well. He becomes their main target but is always a few steps ahead of the pair and the game of cat and mouse commences.
The film is set in an unknown time period, and no cell phones mean the film can’t close time and distance so characters are always a step behind, using pagers and phone booths. It is dark and grimy, playing to the underbelly of LA and not the money and glamour with which it is often represented.
The Little Things is doing a thing which lots of films are doing lately which I really dislike. They drop in some information at the very end of the film which reframes everything you have seen but not in a way where you say: how did I miss that? But just in an information dump to explain character behaviours that haven’t really made sense up until now.
The film had so much going for it. A great cast. Washington is still lightning on the screen. I was trying to figure out what it was, it’s like he always has an internal monologue going inside his head, thinking about some prior event. He makes the world feel fuller and more real. It had an interesting story mixed with murder and intrigue but as the title suggests, it’s the little things that let it down and ultimately made it an unfulfilling watch for me.
18 February 2021
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe