A Small Fortune (2021) Dying Town Malaise and Small-time Canadian Crime (Review)

A breed of director has had success to such a profound degree that their name has become an adjective through which other films are qualified or compared. Spielbergian, Malickian, Lynchian, Coen Brothers-like, you get the idea, but the point remains that such qualifiers favour neither party. This leads me to 101 Films’ latest release, the very low-key Canadian crime movie A Small Fortune by writer/director Adam Perry, a feature debut described by some as Coen-like. 

The difference between what Perry does and the Coen Crime Cannon is scale – a scale which Adam Perry’s A Small Fortune is far meeker than. Events take place in a very isolated part of Canada, where the only way to make a living is to leave this dying town, something that Kevin Doucette (Stephen Oates) refuses to do despite the protestations of his pregnant wife, Sam (Liane Balaban). They scrape by, somehow, due to Kevin’s stubborn work ethic. Kevin trades moss with the elderly Omer (Bill McFadden), who sells pot and fishing tackles from a scrapyard. One day, Kevin finds a bag of money on the beach in one of these moss piles and takes it home. In this small town where everyone knows everyone, so when Troy (Joel Thomas Hynes) turns up asking questions, it draws the suspicions of the barebones police force – Jim Bradley (Matt Cooke) and Susan Crowe (Andrea Bang, Kim Convenience & Fresh). With mysterious bodies found and hastily buried to keep the money secret, it all blows up in an awkward, accidental flurry once Troy and Kevin meet.

The plot seems like a pretty open and closed book – an unsuspecting local finds a bag of money, and a bad guy comes to town looking for it, but both parties are so unused to the circumstances they find themselves in – things don’t unfold like you’d expect them to. Events are lively for the most part, especially when interjecting wrinkles like the police effort fronted by a young deputy who goes on to deputise locals as there is literally no way to do her job otherwise. While hard to describe it as fresh given how tired the tropes are, it keeps the motor running and keep it away from accusations of being tired by having these clumsy characters at the heart of it. That is the Coen influence that matters, rather than more surface comparisons that might draw this film to the titanic brothers of American cinema.

There are two ways for a crime movie to stand out from the crowd in 2023, brutal violence or slow pacing – A Small Fortune is the latter. While it makes sense for time to pass slowly in a town where the last person to leave can turn out the lights, it doesn’t translate kindly to momentum. You could tell me that the 90 minute runtime was over 2 hours, and I’d believe you. While well performed across the board, the main protagonist, Kevin, is a non-entity. The only occasion he flirts with being an interesting character is when he daydreams about the money. And herein lies the issue: Kevin is a bone-headed stubborn man who only thinks of work, and because the script, direction and acting achieve that, it becomes the sum of its parts. Spending time with a well-realised boring character is still spending time with a boring character. The same can be said of Troy, too. The interesting characters are the women, but the script skims past them to focus on two boring men dealing badly with an escalating situation.

There is plenty to compliment A Small Fortune for. Adam Perry has penned a script that gets to the heart of the malaise rushing through the veins of many small, dying towns. Every performance is a compelling one. The cinematography from Jeff Wheaton and music by Andrew Staniland get to the heart of this spent towns ambience. And the plot keeps you guessing through the entire back half, even if I’m not a fan of where it ultimately lands. However, it is next to impossible for a indie crime movie to stand out in 2023, and there’s little here to stop A Small Fortune from getting lost in that vast crowd.     

Rob’s Archive: A Small Fortune