‘Giant Little Ones’ is a middling, if promising, effort.
“Giant Little Ones” has dramatic situations and a smart and gripping premise, but it trips itself up here and there. It’s slow and vague when it should be brisk and definitive — and yet, as teen dramas go, it has a certain something.
Two teenage boys are best friends. They go to a party, get drunk, come home and flop into bed, dead tired. And then one of them, Ballas (Darren Mann), without invitation, starts performing a sex act on the other, Franky ( Josh Wiggins). Franky has a startled reaction, and Ballas bolts.
Here’s the interesting part: Ballas is the more powerful of the two boys — tougher, better looking, more successful with girls, stronger in every way that counts when you’re 17. He wants to keep it that way, so instead of remaining quiet about the bedroom incident, he tells everybody — but reverses the situation. He tells everyone that Franky tried to perform this sex act on him, and that he threw Franky out.
This becomes a big deal. In high school these days there’s no stigma to being gay, but there’s definitely a stigma to not owning who you are. Plus, Franky’s girlfriend loses interest, and Ballas makes sure that Franky is ostracized from their social circle. All of a sudden, Franky is on the outside of his previously comfortable little world.
So, you have a situation of a kid being punished for something he didn’t do. You have unnecessary pain arising from another kid feeling ashamed of his own nature. And you have this all taking place at a time when these young people are discovering themselves sexually. They’re virgins. They barely know what’s going on with themselves.
This is plenty for one little movie, but writerdirector Keith Behrman can’t leave it alone. He takes a story that no attentive person could possibly consider anti-gay and, as if covering his bets, ties himself into a straitjacket of political correctness. Without committing to the idea, he floats the possibility that Franky might also be gay. He gives Franky a gay father (Kyle MacLachlan).
The movie also suffers from an oddness in pacing, so that you have major plot advances followed by scenes of absolute nothingness.
The good news is that the pace picks up; “Giant Little Ones” actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about — not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.