Method to Madness: "The Little Things" Review

★★ (2/5)

The Little Things had unwavering potential to be great. On paper, HBO Max’s latest original movie almost seemed too good to be true: a brooding psychological thriller with a really cool trailer, an established director at the helm but most notably—it boasted not one, not two, but three Oscar winning performers going toe-to-toe. It was like The Irishman for gritty crime junkies.

Further adding to the film’s mounting hype was Warner Bros’ decision to roll out their entire 2021 film slate on HBO Max; The Little Things wasn’t just a movie, but a colossal first step into the new order for how audiences will ostensibly experience most, if not all cinematic entertainment this year. The film’s marketing was a strong statement of arrival that previewed a tense, melancholic thriller—instead, we got a fumbling mood piece where Rami Malek describes the undigested beef in a dead woman’s stomach and Jared Leto was doing…that creepy Jared Leto thing.

It wasn’t unwatchable but it certainly didn’t rise to the occasion. Were our sights set too high? Or were there nuanced issues that proved too costly to save? For a film with so much going for it, you can’t help but wonder where things went wrong. So let’s dive into it and break down the big and the small of what didn’t work with John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things.

I don’t know who let the anarchist Golden Globe saboteur into its voting core—the acting in this movie was flat out bad. Like, glaringly bad. This is despite all three being really good actors. Take Rami Malek for example; the first time he registered with me was when I watched Short Term 12. While he was only a side character, there was an odd subtlety about him that really seemed to stick. In 2015, he was cast as series lead in Mr. Robot, a role that inevitably earned him notoriety as a character actor, one who leans into really distinguished, borderline overt personas. In 2018, he scored huge as Freddie Mercury in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Malek had now entered a new echelon, a higher rung exclusive only to those worthy of the most iconic roles of his generation.

Let’s shift gears and focus on the outlier in this equation: Jared Leto, no stranger to taking on the weirdest of weird roles from the start. If even you needed any more proof of this (I highly doubt you do), feel free to look up his dramatic weight gain in Chapter 27 as Mark David Chapman, the sociopath who assassinated John Lennon. If character actors had a Mount Rushmore, some might argue it would just be Jared Leto’s face four times. Despite this, his pedigree as an actor is unquestionable, having clinched an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2013 for his transformative role in Dallas Buyers Club. With all this in mind, it’s a safe assumption that Leto will always double down on unique roles with a blind ambition that unfortunately only pays off some of the time.

Sometimes it’s more blindness than ambition.

The Little Things pits Malek against Leto which results in the alchemic equivalent to bleach and vinegar, an offensive mixture. Malek plays Jimmy Baxter, an eccentric L.A. detective hot on the trail of Leto’s Albert Sparma, a maniacal weirdo. The weakness in their interplay doesn’t fall entirely on the script, but also the peculiarity in the way they’ve constructed their characters. They both put up an effort to make bold character choices but instead, only end up leaving viewers disoriented with their sheer weirdness. All of Malek’s dialogue is spoken through a monotonic groan, almost guttural in nature. Leto seems to be lost in a foreign astral plane altogether. When paired, they take the film in such different directions that even Denzel Washington himself can’t keep the movie afloat. We’ll circle back to that a bit later.

The Little Things was written in 1993 but was iced for almost 30 years. Since then, thrillers have evolved in so many substantial ways so this film might frustrate viewers who were hoping for a sizzling platter of rising tension. The film suffers from pacing issues that I want to describe as “slow burn” but in all reality, it’s just slow. Being conceived in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs, you can see a reasonable effort in replicating those iconic thought-provoking elements: moral code, right and wrong, psychological depth. But vague, muddled writing prevent it from becoming so, thus falling short in activating any meaningful provocation.

“Show me where you buried the ending, you sunuvabitch”

Character motivations are wildly unclear which only adds to the disorientation. Many “big” moments feel unearned, which is a stark deviation from the subgenre; in David Fincher’s Se7en, the reason we’re so consumed by its depravity is the calculation with which the reveals are presented. The suspense only heightens because it feels earned but if one minor detail is missed or neglected, it could ruin the entire payoff. Somehow The Little Things unwinds like a series of missed and neglected details so its ending suffers from a serious lack of resolve.

The movie touches on some interesting themes that mostly go unfulfilled. Having seen so many iterations of the story, the film beats on overplayed tropes that make it harder for it to really set itself apart. Knowing this, their casting trifecta of Denzel/Malek/Leto was the over-reliant Hail Mary its imminent success or failure hinged upon. When their performances don’t live up to the hype or serve its intended purpose, audiences might find it hard to resonate with damn near anything in this film.

“Your d**k is hard as Chinese arithmetic” - Actual line from the movie

If The Little Things has a saving grace, Denzel Washington is it by a longshot. He plays Joe Deacon, a former homicide detective haunted by ghosts of cases past, caught in the fray of this grisly affair. His role demands a little more restraint and silent repression but when your co-stars are running amok chewing up scenery, it creates an imbalance that the movie never recovers from. This movie stresses the importance of how acting can make or break its tonal stability; while Denzel carries an enormous weight to keep this movie glued to its foundations, he’s thwarted by the two oppositional forces of nature who threaten to topple it.

In addition to its one really good performance, the film’s visual elements stand out as one of its strongest components. There’s a particular timelessness to crime movies set in L.A., a striking composition that manages to capture that carefully hidden ugliness beneath its many sprawling highways. Lighting and mood play a major factor in the way you engage with its setting, especially during night scenes. As eye-catching as it is, the film can’t capitalize due to poor editing that makes its presentation seem needlessly propulsive and arbitrarily thrown together. When its editing suffers, a film’s cadence is at stake, thus sabotaging the way viewers perceive its story.

All things considered, John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things might still find an audience with those who want to kick back and throw popcorn at the screen, while basking in the presence of three award winners trying new things. Plus, there’s a respectable admiration for the movie it was trying to be, though it sadly falls short of—but sometimes we tend to look at a movie’s stat line through rose-colored lenses.

Leto’s alter ego sings lead vocals for 30 Seconds to SARS

Remember The Snowman? Michael Fassbender starring, Tomas Alfredson directing, Martin Scorsese producing—universally disliked and mocked mercilessly. At the end of the day, a good movie is never defined by the weight of its parts, but the efficiency with which they operate. And if your movie features Jared Leto, you’d better hope you have enough face paint to last you the entire shoot.