The Little Things (2021)

The Little Things finds John Lee Hancock directing a mystery-thriller screenplay he’s kicked around for a few decades. The origin of the story began in 1992 after Steven Spielberg had read the script for A Perfect World. Spielberg loved it contacted Hancock to collaborate on a future project, so they entered into a blind option deal with Warner Brothers, for who Hancock was in a three-picture contract. After some back and forth, Hancock, a screenwriter with a law degree who loved crime dramas, came up with an outline for The Little Things.

Hancock wrote The Little Things in reaction to the crime dramas of the 1980s. He felt these cop thrillers were too predictable, only interesting in the beginning when we don’t know what’s happening. By the third act, after all the pieces had been put into place, we always ended with an extended chase and shootout that sees the good guy kill the bad guy. Hancock wanted to make a film where audiences wouldn’t know what’s going to happen right down to the last shot. The Little Things would avoid predictability because we go into the ending not knowing whether the bad guy is bad or the good guys are good. He wanted the story to stay unraveled rather than try to tie things up and it would still be a satisfying watch for the audience.

Spielberg liked the script but he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to take it on. He was just finishing up on Schindler’s List and needed something that wasn’t another dark and depressing film. In 1995, after Clint Eastwood directed Hancock’s A Perfect World, Eastwood decided that he could also direct and star in The Little Things. Matthew McConaughey and George Clooney were courted as the co-star. Eventually, Eastwood scrapped that and roped in Hancock to work on a different project, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

In 1996, Warren Beatty expressed interest, meeting with Hancock several times over the course of a year to go over the script and what he wanted, but he never did proceed beyond talking about it. In 1997, Warner Bros’ was looking at letting Danny DeVito direct and cast Robert De Niro as the star, and it looked like it was going to get made, but never did.  Other directors called about the possibility of making it, including Dean Parisot, who producer Mark Johnson worked with for Home Fries and Galaxy Quest, but one hangup was the ending, which a studio exec said was the issue. Hancock wasn’t willing to change it because that ending was the entire point of making it.

In 2002, after the success of his debut Hollywood feature for Disney called The Rookie, producer Mark Johnson encouraged him to direct it himself. However, Hancock and his wife were taking care of two young twins at the time and the subject matter seemed too dark for him to want to have on his mind every day for a couple of years. Every couple of years, Johnson asked again, but it never seemed quite right.

After Johnson’s kids left to go to college, Hancock’s creative friends Scott Frank and Brian Helgeland separately contacted him to encourage him to make the film. He decided to give it a serious look. As he read, he took to rewriting some of the dialogue and reimagining the characterizations, but most of what remains in the final script are how he wrote it back in the 1990s, including the setting, 1990, back before cell phones, modern forensics, and DNA analysis.

Set in 1990, Joe ‘Deke’ Deacon is a burnt-out deputy from Kern County, CA, who left working the spotlight of high-profile cases five years ago for quieter pastures, sacrificing the spotlight and his family in the process. Rami Malek is Jim Baxter, a hotshot homicide detective for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on top of the case to catch a serial killer brutally slaughtering young women. Deke has a knack for visualizing crime scenes and cracking cases by observing ‘the little things’ – the seemingly unimportant clues that lead a serial killer to be caught.  However, his reputation of following his own guidelines rather than the law has earned him a reputation, especially as events of his past have haunted him to ruin.

Deke travels to LA to deliver evidence for a case from Bakersfield but finds himself drawn into doing additional legwork off the clock because of the similarities between the current murders and one he had been working on back when he was last in Los Angeles that precipitated his exile. The arrogant Baxter initially dismisses Deacon as a loose cannon distraction, but eventually finds there’s a method to his madness that could be an asset to cracking the case. Their clues eventually lead to appliance deliverer Albert Sparma, though they aren’t quite sure if he did the deeds or if he’s merely drawn close to the case because he is a fanatic for serial-killer crimes and intrigued at being thought of as a suspect. However, the demons that plague Deke seem to be infecting Baxter as he too begins to obsess about the case.

The cast is bolstered by three Academy Award-winning actors in Washington, Malek, and Leto. Washington delivers an excellent, internally conflicted performance as an aging, deeply troubled cop so obsessed with trying to do something selfless that it ultimately becomes self-serving. Deke believes he is the only one who can do the victims’ justice.

Hancock, who had a friendship with Denzel after working closely with him while doing script doctoring for Safe House and The Magnificent Seven, had him as his top choice to play Deacon.  Washington was skeptical about playing another cop but accepted because found the script an absorbing read and something different. He had never portrayed a cop who was scarred and who had lost his faith, so this presented an opportunity to show someone on a spiritual journey to do what he feels is right. Washington drew inspiration from an A&E reality show on TV about detectives called, “The First 48” and he became hooked on their antics, especially in their tenacity and what they did to solve their cases.

For the co-star, Denzel and Hancock settled on Rami Malek, who shined brightly as Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. Malek’s personality was very different from Denzel’s, making for believable friction for their characters. Malek instantly accepted the role to work with Washington. Just like Baxter does with Deacon in the movie, Malek used his time with him to pick his brain on acting and his philosophy on staying dedicated and passionate about what he does. Hancock knew he had a very capable cast and worked with them extensively to shape their characters. Once it got to the point where the actors knew their characters even more than he did, he allowed them free range to improvise when they saw fit through each scene as they shot.

Jared Leto expressed interest in working with Hancock after seeing The Founder, which he thought was a great American movie. Hancock kept him in mind ever since and thought he would be perfect as Sparma. Leto was interested in working with Washington and Malek but he was becoming typecast into villain roles and having his mindset stuck in the darker side of things. Hancock was able to convince him that the character wasn’t villainous but a complex and fully rounded one who might be an amateur detective rather than the killer. Sparma finds the notion that he could be the suspect tantalizing, enjoying the cat and mouse game. Deke and Baxter become convinced they have their man, but Sparma gives them enough to continue thinking that but not enough from an evidence side to arrest him for it.

Leto agreed to play another “villain” if he could push the boundaries of the character into something where he could no longer be recognized. He developed a unique walk, a look that includes a prosthetic nose, fake teeth, and brown contact lenses, mannerisms, and way of speaking. He even decided to give his character a bit of a paunch because Sparma is a foodie whose life revolves around food, which ties into one of the clues surrounding the murders.

Sparma’s look fittingly could be viewed as either Jesus Christ or Charles Manson, further adding to the ambiguity between savior and killer – something that also hangs over Deacon, who sees himself as both savior and killer for reasons that we learn about later into the film. Leto studied FBI transcripts for the way suspects talk during interrogations. He also requested not to meet any of the other actors until it was time to film, and only while he was in character. Leto contributed details on what Sparma’s obsessions were and how they changed his life to become the misfit he is. Meanwhile, Denzel did some method acting of his own by observing Leto without him knowing it while he was off the set.

One theme that resonates is that the danger of tunnel vision, By spending so much time focusing on the “little things”, people begin to lose focus of the big things in their life, like diet, family, and home life. To flesh this out, literally, Washington gained 35 lbs. through a high-calorie diet of cake, milkshakes, and butter pecan Haagen Dazs, while engaging in as little exercise as necessary. During the shoot, Denzel began the process of losing the weight to shoot the flashback scenes of a younger Deacon toward the end of the shoot.

Hancock made the determination since there was only one main suspect, that there would be enough evidence to lead the detectives to think Sparma could be the culprit but also enough details that bolster the claim that he might not be. It’s important to note that some of the clues about the killer, such as his car, his gait, and his appearance are things we can surmise in the audience but which these detectives do not.  Hancock worked extensively with film editor Robert Frazen to make sure there were enough visual clues for either side to be plausible before the ending. Much of their work went into what things they should show when they should show them, and for how long.

Thomas Newman’s score is a major asset to set the mood and tempo, wistfully drawing us into the philosophical underpinnings of the character’s actions. The sounds go well with Jonathan Schwartzman’s roving cinematography, particularly stunning in the car sequences. The color schemes and lighting are top-notch (Hancock was inspired by the look of The American Friend) at further evoking the feeling of dread when necessary.

Some will see traces of the film Seven within The Little Things, another signal that the story hasn’t updated much since Hancock wrote it in the mid-1990s, and even then he envisioned it like a throwback to the complex, character-driven cop films of 1970s. Some elements, like the cop who gets to into the mind of the killer that it changes him, come from 1986’s Manhunter, and the terrifying perspective of the first victim from another Thomas Harris novel, Silence of the Lambs.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Little Things had a very small theatrical rollout concurrent with a debut on the HBO MAX streaming platform on January 29, 2021. They weren’t able to have test screenings to see what worked and what didn’t for audiences coming in cold, but thought that might be helpful in not compromising their vision.

While the murder case is a bit cliched, partially because Hancock’s material had been meant to be made into a film back in the 1990s and so much has happened in the crime drama genre that has done what this film does and more. However, it’s for the accumulation of all of “little things” that work so well that this cliched film garners a recommendation.

Qwipster’s rating: B+

MPAA Rated: R for violent/disturbing images, language, and full nudity
Run time: 127 min.

Cast: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Michael Hyatt, Chris Bauer, Terry Kinney, Natalie Morales, Isabel Araiza
Director: John Lee Hancock
Screenplay: John Lee Hancock