“The octogenarian’s worry for his country’s many mistakes shines through in little boy, but he fails at creating a consistent and coherent message.”

It all began 81 million years ago… American director James Benning allows himself a bit of humor at the start of his latest film little boy, a rarity in the oeuvre of the master of contemplative documentary filmmaking. Little boy opens with a shot of a plastic model of a dinosaur skeleton, scored by sounds of the forest and the low growl of what is presumably said dinosaur. Benning then skips forward to more serious matters, but several elements make the film more open than usual and deviate from most of his previous works. The static shots are still there, and as always there is much to contemplate, but little boy is more lively than any Benning before due to the introduction of a pair of hands, a bit of music, and a lot of spoken text which holds the meat on the bone that Benning seemingly has to pick with his country and especially the people who run it. Little boy is a politically charged film, and much more directly so than his previous work. One hardly needs to read between the lines to get the gist of the message here. Whether Benning’s transition to more explicit interpretations of his work is successful is debatable, as the film lacks the congruence of Lee Anne Schmitt’s Evidence, a film that is similar in execution but structurally more precise and insightful.

From prehistoric times Benning jumps forward to 1961, and we see the hands of a young boy (the titular one, perhaps?) meticulously painting a plastic construction kit while Ricky Nelson’s It’s Late plays. We’ve already had more movement than in most James Benning films before we pass into more familiar territory with a minutes-long static shot of the end product of the boy’s handiwork, some miniature storage tanks for oil. Played on top is the farewell speech of former US president Eisenhower, in which he warns of the military-industrial complex (a warning that was clearly not heeded in the decades to come). This will be little boy‘s modus operandi for the rest of its 75-minute runtime: a time jump, increasingly older hands painting model kits while a hit song of the time plays, and the finished model being accompanied by speeches by or interviews with the likes of George Wallace, Stokely Carmichael, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton. The subject matter deals with the hot topics of their respective eras: segregation and civil rights, exploitation of immigrant workers, US-made crises in the Middle East, homelessness and environmental issues. It’s a who’s who of the US’s major post-war problems, often self-inflicted and the result of a hunger for power or money, or both. The film ends on a shot of a model of Little Boy, the nickname of the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, while Harry S. Truman informs the American people of the decisive blow it has struck. Seemingly Benning’s thoughts are in line with the recently deceased David Lynch, who less than a decade ago posited the same idea in Twin Peaks: The Return: all of our problems started with the brainchild of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Benning seems to have a problem creating a throughline. Given the plethora of big issues (while often interconnected) covering a wide range of ideas, the film tends to become a scattershot bullet point list of hot-button topics that doesn’t really elucidate their interconnectedness. This extends to the songs the film uses: it starts off well, with The Shirelles immediately following Eisenhower’s speech about the military-industrial complex, but soon the songs lose all thematic meaning. Surely Tracy Chapman’s brilliant Fast Car would have paired better with a speech by young activist Severn Cullis-Suzuki about, among other things, young people having to live in their car? Unfortunately it gets stuck between Hillary Clinton speaking about Al Qaeda and Dr. Helen Caldicott rambling about Americans being good at killing. Other inclusions like Sinéad O’Connor’s beautiful rendition of Molly Malone are even more befuddling.

Some of Benning’s work in the past has been political, but never was it this overt. The octogenarian’s worry for his country’s many mistakes shines through in little boy, but he fails at creating a consistent and coherent message. Is it perhaps in the finished models that we see? They too seem to have little to do with the audio fragments played on top of them, so maybe the state they are in, painted as somewhat dilapidated and rusty, is meant to carry meaning. But whereas previous works had little to hold onto by design, given the viewer ample time to let the mind wander and conjure up interpretation by association, in little boy there is often too much to hold onto, and room for interpretation is not left to the wandering mind, yet also not congruent with the imagery and other elements of the production. Benning’s frustration can be felt, but watching little boy can be quite frustrating in its own right. There are good ideas and intentions here, and Benning’s work will always invite contemplation even if it is more straightforward like this film, but little boy is too unfocused to work as a successful indictment of American politics.

Image copyright: James Benning