It's slow with no grand moments. Maybe that's the suburban point?
Little Boxes
Grade: C
Director: Rob Meyer (Aquarium)
Screenplay: Annie J. Howell (Claire in Motion)
Cast: Melanie Lynsky (Up in the Air), Nelsan Ellis (The Stanford Prison Experiment)
Runtime: 1 hr 24 min
by John DeSando
“You are so interesting.” (White townie to new black resident)
Little Boxes is a little film that wants to be more than it is. While it would like to be a quirky tale of an interracial family moving from NYC to white Washington State, it's a slow moving story of a few dysfunctions on the part of the rural town faced with the black and white presence and awkwardly responding to it.
The white mother, Gina, played underwhelming by Melanie Lynskey, accepts a tenure-track job at Rome College with perks her black writer husband, Mack (Nelsan Ellis), appreciates if only because his second book is taking a great deal of time. Eleven-year- old son, Clark (Armani Jackson), is experiencing a new life with a couple of 11-year-old girls, nothing grand, just the kind of pre-teen exploration that seems awfully tame from my jaded point of view.
The meaty issues that hover over the biracial motif are meekly treated by a few pedestrian lines such as a young girl exclaiming the town needs a black: “We like totally needed a black kid. This town is SO white!” Or about husband a neighbor says, "If you close your eyes you can't even tell he's black." The mold hiding in the family’s house is hardly a hidden metaphor. Embarrassing stuff
The only excitement in this turgid melodrama is when Clark gets in trouble for boyish misdeeds, odd actually for such a nice kid. I'm trying not to mention the four female professors at bad karaoke while over drinking on their regular lunch break. Even worse Gina is criticized for getting "sloppy" in a small town--a definite no no and a signal of intolerance almost unheard of in Brooklyn.
Clearly Little Boxes (hmm, people trapped? town?) is not in the suburban satirical league of Ice Storm and American Beauty. Even in the final act, a resolution occurs so quickly as to be unbelievable. But I'm not going to spoil one of the only spirited parts of the film.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
