Little Manhattan (2005)

Little Manhattan, released in 2005, concerns a ten-year-old boy named Gabe who falls in love with a classmate named Rosemary, courts her across Central Park and the Carlyle, breaks his hand trying to earn a yellow belt, and learns that his divorcing parents still love each other. This is the entire film. It runs ninety minutes and contains no thesis. The Manhattan it depicts is affluent and largely untroubled, and nobody in it feels compelled to explain what that affluence means or whom it excludes. The camera simply follows a scooter.

There are, to be fair, a handful of details that a more anxious production might have inflated into statements. Rosemary's family includes a three-year-old adopted sister from China. The building has a friendly concierge, and Rosemary has a nanny, both played by Black actors, both entirely at ease in their roles and neither asked to carry thematic freight. Race and class sit in the frame as furniture, unremarked and unexamined, which is precisely why they do not register on any of the indices we maintain. The parents divorce and reconcile without a single speech about modern marriage. The boy's jealousy of a taller, blonder karate rival is treated as jealousy, not as a lesson about masculinity.

The result is a film of almost archaeological interest. It predates the era in which a children's romance would need to justify its own perspective, its own casting, or its own choice of neighborhood. The romance is conventional, the gaze belongs to the boy, and the movie seems untroubled by either fact. It is sweet, slight, and utterly without sermon. We score it accordingly: a clean zero across the board, and a faint, nostalgic sigh.