A Small Fortune review – stash of cash thriller about a schmuck trying to make an easy buck
Shot and set on Prince Edward Island in Canada, with an almost all-Canadian cast and crew, one gets the feeling this ponderous drama was also made largely for a local audience. Writer-director Adam Perry takes a classic moral-dilemma set-up – poor protagonist finds a substantial amount of seemingly abandoned cash and must decide whether to keep it or call the cops – and puts a distinctly Prince Edward Island spin on it. On one level, that means taking advantage of the pretty rural scenery, with its old-fashioned clapboard houses and miles of beach, as well as interesting local traditions such as harvesting Irish moss (actually not a moss but a variety of nutritious seaweed) that main character Kevin Doucette (Stephen Oates) collects like his ancestors did on the shore with horse and trap.
However, on another level, and despite the no-doubt generous funding from local film commissions, the setting prompts the characters to whinge a lot about how boring and hardscrabble life is on the island and how much they’d like to leave if only they could. The strong influence of Irish ancestry is audible in the accents themselves. So if you were just listening to the dialogue alone, you might think this was an Irish film like The Banshees of Inisherin, but without the absurdist humour, sparkling dialogue, inventive violence, miniature donkeys and cute dogs, or any strikingly talented personnel involved.
Instead, mopey, stubborn Kevin finds thousands of conveniently plastic, brightly coloured Canadian dollars on the beach while collecting his seaweed/moss, and squirrels it away, not considering that it must surely be the property of gangsters because they’re the only people who use that kind of cash these days. Also, his longsuffering nurse wife Sam (Liane Balaban) is pregnant, and keeps noting their imminent need for a crib. When he finally shows up with the crib, a new tractor and a lobster dinner, she’s understandably a bit suspicious that he’s made a windfall not just by selling seaweed/moss to salty-tongued local seaweed/moss middleman Omer (Bill McFadden, who is at least a bit of a hoot and to whom the film is dedicated as he died after making this).
The only person on the island who seems to have the merest lick of sense is new police constable Susan Crowe (Andrea Bang), who takes veiled racist abuse from the locals when she tries to dispense vehicle tickets; she comes up top trumps by the end. Maybe Perry’s next film will be about her and offer a thinly veiled reworking of Fargo, the same way this is a trace-off of A Simple Plan and the many other noir films where schmucks try to make an easy buck.
• A Small Fortune is released on 8 May on digital platforms