Little Boy

Here is a movie with a great big heart, but unfortunately it lacks the brains to go with it.  Even more unfortunate, the heart at the center of the film is gooey, cloying and artificial.  Little Boy so desperately wants to warm our hearts and wring our tear ducts that by the end, my emotions felt like they had been assaulted.  In order for something like this to work, it has to come from an honest place, and I could find no honesty in the screenplay.  Just non-stop forced sentiment.

The story is set in one of those picturesque little 1940s towns that you only find in the movies or Norman Rockwell paintings.  It's the kind of movie small town where everybody knows what the main character is doing, and it's all they ever talk about.  It even comes with an warm old man to narrate the story, who points out the obvious in a folksy tone that sounds like he's trying to emulate the old man narrator from A Christmas Story.  The hero of the film is Pepper Busbee (Jakob Salvati), a boy of about seven or eight who is very short for his age.  He is constantly picked on by local bullies, who call him "Little Boy".  Pepper's only friend is his dad, James (Michael Rapaport), who shares the boy's love of comic books, movies and dreaming up imaginary cowboy and pirate adventures.  The two are inseparable, until World War II breaks out, and James is forced to go and fight overseas in the place of his oldest son, London (David Henrie from Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2), who was rejected from serving in the military due to his flat feet.

Poor Pepper is devastated and mopes about, until he attends a magic show and gets to go on stage with the magician.  He helps perform a trick, where the boy supposedly moves a glass bottle across a table with the power of his mind.  This gets Pepper to think if he can movie a glass bottle with his mind, why can't he will his father back home from the war?  He decides to visit a local priest (Tom Wilkinson) for support, and he gives the boy a list of good deeds he can do that may help his wish for his father to come back faster.  These include things like giving a homeless person a place to sleep, or clothing a naked person (Pepper learns to knit a shirt for a pregnant woman's future baby).  But the most important thing on the list is to befriend a Japanese man who lives on the outskirts of town in a scary old house named Hashimoto (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).  Earlier in the film, Pepper and his brother London had thrown rocks through the man's window after they found out their father was missing in action, and presumably being held in a Japanese prison camp.  Pepper feels bad about his actions, and the priest encourages Pepper to make friends with the man and show him kindness.

A majority of the film is devoted to Pepper and Hashimoto becoming friends, with the kid learning about the man's culture, and Hashimoto helping Pepper with his bully troubles, as well as helping him do the other items on the priest's "good deeds" list.  Their friendship is supposed to carry the film, but I never really felt it as strongly as I should have.  That's the problem with Little Boy in general.  It has good intentions, but it doesn't know how to carry them through, or present them in a way that is dramatically interesting.  The film feels inert and endless.  These are all nice people, but that's all they are.  They are not allowed to express any emotion except gentle warmth and apathy.  The bullies and local drunks who eye Hashimoto suspiciously because of his nationality never come across as a serious threat, because the movie is not interested in them other than as one-dimensional villains.  Little Boy wants to be about tolerance and forgiveness, but it tackles these issues merely at face value. 

The movie also throws in a lot of subplots that don't really go anywhere.  There's a lonely local doctor played by Kevin James (yet another Paul Blart veteran), who tries to get involved with Pepper's mom (Emily Watson) when it looks like her husband won't be coming back from the war.  The character is completely inconsequential to the plot, and the movie would be no different with or without him.  There's also a plot surrounding the older brother, London, and how he feels about Pepper hanging around with Hashimoto.  His opinion on the Japanese man seems to change from scene to scene.  One moment, he storms into the house with a shotgun and threatens to kill Hashimoto when he sees him sitting at the table, having dinner with his mom and little brother.  A few scenes later, when a mean drunk beats Hashimoto nearly to death because the drunk's son was killed in the war, London suddenly and without explanation feels empathy toward him, and helps Hashimoto.  These characters are solely at the mercy of the screenplay, and act according to it.

You know, I kind of feel bad criticizing Little Boy.  The movie is genuinely harmless, and is as eager and ready to please as a puppy.  All it wants to do is warm the hearts of its audience.  But the way it wants to do so is just so calculated and manipulative, and it doesn't earn the emotions that it wants to create.  The movie is blunt and shameless with its manipulations.  From the way the movie depicts small town life through a soft-focus lens in order to create nostalgia, to the sappy music score that spells out everything we're supposed to be feeling, the film is relentless and seems to be trying to earn its emotions through brute force.  In order for a movie like this to work, there needs to be a sense of honesty, or characters who seem genuine.  Director and co-writer Alejandro Monteverde wants to shove these warm feelings down our throats, rather than earn them through strong storytelling and writing.

This is a movie for people who don't care what they're watching, just as long as it has a happy ending and nothing bad happens in it.  Despite scenes of war and the subject of hatred and racism, everybody generally ends up okay in the end.  The movie has been rated PG-13, but it's quite possibly the gentlest and most timid movie to ever be given that rating.

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