A Small Fortune — A Small Fortune(VOD)
A Small Fortune is the second feature film from director Adam Perry and follows desperate father-to-be Kevin (Stephen Oates) as he discovers a bag of cash floating off the coast of Prince Edward Island. Keeping the stash secret, even from his wife Sam (Liane Balaban), he decides to start setting his life back on the right path. However, when people start turning up asking for the money to be returned, Kevin becomes the heart of an island-wide manhunt. With his child and his life on the line, Kevin must protect his family at all costs.
In 1998, Sam Rami released arguably his most underrated film; A Simple Plan. I only raise this because, aside from loving the film, A Small Fortune is excessively derivative of that original Rami production. Now drawing from influences heavily isn’t inherently a bad thing, just take a look at Aronofsky’s Black Swan and how heavily it draws from Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue. But Aronofsky adds his own touch to his reinterpretation of Kon’s ideas, Perry just makes A Simple Plan again but with about half an hour cut down on the run time. This derivative nature does really hamper A Small Fortune, it makes viewing the film quite arduous since you’re sat there easily guessing where everything is going and the twists and turns are visible from miles away. There are also a number of narrative tangents that don’t really go anywhere as well, notably the inclusion of a racist police chief which goes nowhere.
The film does shine in its visual presentation actually. Cinematographer Jeff Wheaton gets the camera in these really claustrophobic positions which does a great job at tonally reflecting the film’s narrative. Houses go from safe to overcrowded, the island loses the scale on would expect and tense arguments become all the more tense when Wheaton keeps the framing full and cramped. Complemented with a great subtle score from Andrew Staniland, it is clear that the technical merits of Perry’s film might outweigh the narrative merits.
Oates and Balaban do make for a convincingly loving and symbiotic couple, but the material the actors have to work with just isn’t all that interesting. Balaban gets an excellent moment right at the end of the film where she delivers a monologue that perfectly captures the weight of the emotional fallout of the events of the film. Oates himself is great at getting across the stress and impact of his trials, but that only really comes across in the later half with his first half performance being a very generic blue-collar worker. Honourable mention to Bill McFadden’s turn as Omer Tom, he’s a funny old-timer who adds a nice bit of comedic levity.
Unfortunately, A Small Fortune just fails to form its own identity. You have seen this before, and you’ve seen it done better. A Small Fortune is currently available digitally from Film 101