Note: This review contains spoilers for \u201cLittle Lorraine.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nNova Scotia, 1986. A town full of Irish and Scottish immigrants completely dependent on the only major industry in their forgotten corner of the world: back-breaking coal mining. Abandoned by their government with families to feed, the only thing to rely on is their work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then everything blows up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The coal mine goes up in flames, leaving Jimmy (Stephen Amell, \u201cArrow\u201d) and his friends with nowhere to turn except Jimmy\u2019s shady Uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie, \u201cPontypool\u201d), who comes knocking with an offer to work on his lobster boat. Against their better judgment, they take the job. When Huey ropes them into an illegal drug-smuggling operation, the only ones left to blame are themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cLittle Lorraine\u201d has no fat in the first act. It doesn\u2019t waste a moment in building empathy for the film\u2019s characters by showing the love and sacrifice they give to those around them. We watch Jimmy put his overalls on at the crack of dawn, laugh with his buddies at a mine meeting and take the shaky camera with us down into the pitch-dark underground. The cinematography augments the constant unease that follows these characters; it\u2019s unpolished because they are, it doesn\u2019t get to stop for even a moment because they don\u2019t either. Orange lamplight baths the scene, foreshadowing an abrupt shift to roaring flame. Screams blend with high-adrenaline sound mixing as the tense atmosphere on screen suffocates the audience. Before the explosion dies down, it takes one of the miners with it. <\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t the loud, world-shattering moments that make this movie compelling, but the quiet ones where everything that needs to be said is done so with a look. At his coworkers\u2019 funeral, Jimmy seems to share his grief with Emma (Auden Thornton, \u201cBeauty Mark\u201d), his wife, through charged eye contact and a sunken expression. She can practically read his mind, and it\u2019s through her understanding of him that the audience discovers Jimmy\u2019s softer side. Emma is also the reason Jimmy takes the job with Huey in the first place. You want to hate her for convincing Jimmy to make this decision, but you can\u2019t. You can see it in her eyes that she truly trusts Huey to bring her husband back to her at the end of every day. Her desperation is palpable in Thornton\u2019s performance, which makes it easy to see how she could miss the venom in Huey\u2019s offer. It\u2019s hard to fault her for having faith.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With this opening, Debut Director Andy Hines sets up a compelling first-act narrative. Unfortunately, the film more or less loses its tight grip on this grounded concept not too long after.\u00a0These human moments clash against the film\u2019s attempt to raise the stakes in later acts. Once the drug operation is revealed, the film prioritizes confrontations with Huey and adrenaline-rushing showdowns with the cartel. Scenes like this work while a desperate tone is still being established, but by the midpoint it\u2019s unclear what the tone is anymore. There are long takes of Jimmy staring guiltily out at the ocean, and while it\u2019s\u00a0an artful attempt to showcase the emotional toll this job takes on him, moments like these are so frequent that they disrupt the film\u2019s momentum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The plot gets even muddier as Baldwin tries to continue raising the stakes to Icarian levels. Interpol investigations meant to create more tension have little actual effect on Huey\u2019s operation. This is the fat that needs to be cut from the latter half of the film \u2014 but it wouldn\u2019t necessarily have to be if there had been any weight given to this subplot in the first place.\u00a0As is, it\u2019s hard to take seriously, particularly with J Balvin\u2019s debut acting performance as Detective Lozano, which feels more mechanical than endearing. It\u2019s a difficult performance to reckon with alongside the emotionally gripping ones from Amell and McHattie. As Jimmy spirals back into addiction from the stress of Huey\u2019s pressure to perform, Amell ensures that every emotion \u2014 stress, anger, despair, desperation \u2014 is kept just below the surface. McHattie, similarly, spits every line out with such malice that Huey\u2019s malevolence emanates through the screen. They do their best to ground the tone while Balvin swings in on a wrecking ball to set his own static status quo. His attempts to showcase a range of emotions end up conveying just two: indifference and confusion. In a film where the characters are built to be anything but indifferent, this stands out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At its core, \u201cLittle Lorraine\u201d is about the extremes honest people are pushed to when they\u2019re abandoned without support. Though Huey is ultimately to blame for roping everyone else into the drug operation, Baldwin also allows him to be right on some occasions, imbuing the character with more complexity than your average cartoon villain. It\u2019s a case of the right idea but the wrong method. This shines through especially well during his midpoint monologue after the crew\u2019s first job, in which they are blindsided. While they are still successful in the end, none of the characters want to come back. Huey offers Jimmy and the crew their earnings, and when they refuse he has no problem snapping at them about their disposable place in society. They\u2019ve given up their lives trying to make ends meet in the mine, simultaneously watching their bosses make more money than they\u2019ll ever see in their lives. Huey may weaponize it, but they all know that playing by the rules will only keep them hungry at the end of the day. This monologue grounds the narrative, then \u2014 we see Huey as more than just a crook, but instead a man shaped by the system. What sets him apart from the others is that he\u2019s the first of them to turn to crime to make ends meet, and he\u2019s made it his whole life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nBy the third act, any attempt at sustaining momentum is gone. The film commits the cardinal sin of removing its protagonist without tying up any loose ends. The foreshadowing of this choice is on the nose, but artful nonetheless. Dream sequences of him being buried in the coffins they use to transport drugs, of the darkness overtaking him with a thousand angry hands, speak to the aesthetic excellence of the film. They let us into the protagonist\u2019s mind with clear nudges toward the external consequences of this internal struggle. But while this might work for the Bible, it doesn\u2019t work for \u201cLittle Lorraine\u201d <\/strong>\u2014 when we lose Jimmy, we lose all reason to care. Without our anchor to the grounded drama of the film, we\u2019re left floating aimlessly out at sea. It took so long to build up any sort of tension, but this turn proves it all to be a waste when we realize there is no lighthouse to lead us toward land.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cLittle Lorraine\u201d promises its audience a voyage through exciting waters. For the most part, it delivers just that \u2014 until you get seasick waiting for it to be over. The stylistic elements overshadow the plot, especially as it begins to drag. Still, that shouldn\u2019t take away from <\/strong>the film\u2019s attempt to showcase the reality of people struggling to get by; in that regard, \u201cLittle Lorraine\u201d never wavers.<\/p>\nDaily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at <\/em>mtobya@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Note: This review contains spoilers for \u201cLittle Lorraine.\u201d Nova Scotia, 1986. A town full of Irish and Scottish immigrants completely dependent on the only major industry in their forgotten corner of the world: back-breaking coal mining. Abandoned by their government with families to feed, the only thing to rely on is their work.\u00a0 And then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[2925,2923,2926,466,2924],"class_list":{"0":"post-2764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-amell","9":"tag-lorraine","10":"tag-mchattie","11":"tag-stars","12":"tag-stephen"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2766,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions\/2766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}