‘SMALL ENGINE REPAIR’ EXPLODES WITH SUSPENSE
John Pollono’s “Small Engine Repair” was a play that created a big noise when it debuted in 2011 in Los Angeles. It won several awards from the Southern California theater community and went to off-Broadway two years later.
No surprise then that it’s now a film and one that bears the soul of its theatrical predecessor. Pollono returns as the director, writer and star, and Jon Bernthal (“The Walking Dead,” “The Punisher”) reprises his role from the LA show.
Yet Pollono has made some major changes under the hood — opening up the film with multiple locations and adding more characters than the four men at the beating heart of the plot — but the alterations don’t muffle the power of the story’s full-throttle tale of class revenge and toxic masculinity.
Frank Romanowski (Pollono), Terrance Swaino (Bernthal) and Packie Hanrahan (Shea Whigham) are three working-class, middle-age friends since childhood in Manchester, N.H., or Manch-Vegas as they call it, a decidedly snarky nickname for the icy, buttoned-down New England city, since it’s the exact the opposite of the glitzy, hedonistic Nevada metropolis. Their lives are going nowhere and they seem to be stuck in a state of endless adolescence. Frank, who has raging anger management issues, is a mechanic who just got out of the slammer. Swaino (everyone calls him by his last name) still thinks he has sway with the ladies at the bar. Packie still rides a BMX bike around town.
Frank does have one mark of success: an ambitious, smart, college-bound teenage daughter, Crystal (Ciara Bravo), whom he adores, though he could do without his ex-wife, Karen (Jordana Spiro), a woman who hasn’t met an alcoholic drink or a profanity she didn’t like. But she wants to be part of Crystal’s life, and Frank lets her, primarily because it’s what Crystal wants.
For the first half of “Small Engine Repair,” it seems more like a well-wrought slice of life, spinning its wheels as it conveys the lives of these characters grasping at the fraying edges of what they see as the middle class. “We’re not poor!,” Frank tells Crystal early on.
Enter Chad (Spencer House), a law student who is part of Frank’s pickup basketball crew and an area drug dealer who expects his rich parents to get him out of any awkward situation in which he might find himself. This is where “Small Engine Repair” turns intriguingly dark and the realization dawns that much of what came before — some of which might have seemed extraneous or unimportant — is vital.
The last 40 minutes or so constitute a tense exercise in claustrophobic suspense and also provide a showcase for Pollono, Bernthal, Whigham, House and Spiro as actors. It’s here that “Small Engine Repair” may be at its stagiest, but it’s here where it’s also at its best.
Good things do indeed come in “Small” packages.