Checked out (the movie!) Little Boy… which is a sentence one should probably not type too often. But, yeah, this is an under-the-radar indie drama at the theaters right now. It’s about a little boy (derp) whose family lives on the Pacific coast during WW2. Dad joins the war effort (specifically against the Japanese) leaving the boy worried and upset but also very confident that if he believes hard enough, dad will come home. And, despite what the trailers show, it’s also about racism against the sole Japanese-American in town. The boy really hates the Japanese man (“we should smash all the japs!”) but when the local priest (Tom Wilkinson) gets wind of this (and about the kid’s belief in the magic powers of a matinee/comic book stage magician who fights crime), he decides to step in.

This movie appears to be a low-level faith-based movie but not one that really smashes you in the head with whatever world-view it has. It’s definitely about faith and a list of things the boy can do to ensure his faith (feeding the poor, housing the homeless, making from with the dirty Jap in town, etc.) but the movie doesn’t get bogged down too much in its specific messages. It also shows the struggle the priest has with talking to the little boy who thinks that, if he believes hard enough and does everything on the priest’s list, his dad will definitely come home from war. The priest knows it’s not that easy but he’s walking a minefield and that was interesting for this “type” of movie.

Unfortunately, sometimes it does go off the rails in terms of the dialog and the imagery… or, rather, I’m left unsure if the movie is self-aware about how it appears or if that appearance is the movie’s message. For example, it’s clearly on the side of humanizing “the enemy” in the Japanese American guy, but the matinee/comic stage magician has a “feathers and all” American Indian companion (like Tonto). While this would be accurate for the depiction of an Indian in the 1940s, I’m not sure the movie knows that it plays weird and awkward today.

But, hey, the movie is still reasonably well acted and has a good heart (even if it gives us a BS ending). I can recommend it, probably as something to catch on Netflix or something one of these days.

Score: 81