Mark Reviews Movies: LITTLE WOODS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2019

"Your choices are only as good as your options are," Ollie (Tessa Thompson) says, when realizing that she's going to have to put her freedom on the line in order to help herself and her family. Under the situation established by Little Woods, she really doesn't have any other choice.

Everything is against Ollie, and it has been for some time. She's on probation, after spending time in prison for transporting and selling prescription drugs from Canada to her neck of the woods in Washington. She had to do the transportation, because her mother, the woman who adopted her as a child, was ill and in constant pain. The selling came from the additional costs—having to pay bills and buy the essentials while Ollie was caring for her dying mother. Nobody else was going to help her, so she had to help herself.

Writer/director Nia DaCosta's film shows people living on such edges—doing what's illegal in order to do something right, sacrificing what could be because of what actually is, relying on the old ways because no new ones appear to be available. One could call it a thriller, in that Ollie and, later, her previously absentee sister Deb (Lily James) are presented with a series of complications and confronting those difficulties means being placed in danger of harm or arrest. The story's foundation, though, is too grounded in a sense of desperate reality to relegate the film to the stature of just some ordinary thriller.

With less than 10 days remaining on her probation, Ollie has to consider selling prescription drugs again, because the bank is about to take her family home. She wants to save it, if only so that Deb, a single mother who's pregnant again, and her young son can have a better place to live than a trailer in a parking lot.

From the start, the two women are at odds to a certain degree. Ollie feels as if her sister left her alone to care for their mother. Deb knows that she did, but she had her reasons at the time. Maybe now those reasons don't seem like a good excuse. Either way, Deb is too proud and too insecure to immediately accept Ollie's offer to live in the house. Ollie argues that it'll just be abandoned, especially if her probation officers (played by Lance Reddick) helps her find a job somewhere else—her ultimate goal. This idea doesn't stick too well with Deb, either. Even with the tension between the sisters, if Ollie leaves, Deb will have no one left.

The film is filled with a sense of loneliness: Ollie living in a house that's too big for her, and Deb cramped into a trailer with her son. They try to scrape some money to pay off the bank. Ollie sells coffee and food to construction workers, some of whom hope she'll go back to selling pain medication. They can barely make it through the day with their various injuries. A doctor's visit means losing hours on a necessary paycheck, and Ollie's former rival Bill (Luke Kirby), who wants Ollie to start selling for him, has prices that are too steep.

With a lot of convincing and anger, Deb tries to get cash from her ex Ian (James Badge Dale). He seems like a regular cad and deadbeat, until we get a glimpse of his own living conditions—stuck in a sparse, brick dormitory for workers at the construction site. When Deb tells him that she's considering a termination of the pregnancy (She wants to have the baby, but it will cost thousands of dollars just to give birth), Ian puts all of that solitude on display.

DaCosta gives so many of these characters such backdrops, from the low ceilings of Bill's prefabricated home to an always-empty motel on the other side of the border. The trek there is through a dark forest, lest anyone catch the characters on their way to doing something illegal, before arriving at a clearing in the sunrise—a sign of some hope amidst the empty sprawl. We never lose the sense of solitude and desolation. Cinematographer Matt Mitchell simply, through natural light and wide shots of enclosed spaces, suggests that there's a different flavor to that feeling for each of these people.

None of the legal plans work, of course, so Ollie digs up what remains of her old stash and gets to selling. The problems, which include a surprise visit from the probation officer and Deb ignoring a warning that her trailer will be towed, certainly do stack up for the protagonists. They occur in such a way that DaCosta could be accused of contriving more and more problems—loading the game against our protagonists. The point, though, is that the game always has been rigged against them and will continue to be, unless they work around the various systems holding them down. A handful of new obstacles and other snags is just to be expected.

We don't particularly care about how those additional barriers—inconvenient for the characters but perfectly convenient for a plot—arise. That's because DaCosta's concerns aren't about the specifics of the plot. Instead, they're about the reliable compression of people, institutions, and situations upon these characters. Little Woods constantly provides a sense of dread about the seemingly ordinary, because that's what it's like to live life on so many edges, with few options and even fewer choices.

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