Hot Docs - Small Wonders

Rating: ***

In the documentary Small Wonders, filmmaker Tally Abecassis shows us three shops in small town Canada and how they struggle to remain relevant in a consumer market driven by the axiom “Bigger is better.” Fittingly, there’s something about the doc itself that feels charmingly antiquated. Abecassis shot the film over 10 years with a 16 mm camera, and the result is a feeling of looking into a time capsule. The man running a watch repair shop, the woman running the corner hardware store and the kindly old man with the photography studio all feel like characters from a drama of yesteryear. The inside of their stores are like boxes shielded from time, but the proprietors are still aware that times have changed.

If you’re looking for a polemic about how Wal-Mart’s ruining the world, this is not your movie. While it would be impossible to tell these stories without touching on the fact that the retail world is all about the mighty big blue box, the tone struck is not accusatory or overly negative. People getting their portraits done at a big box, getting hardware suppliers more cheaply and with greater selection, or throwing out a broken watch is all part of the current trend, and trends change. That’s life, folks.

Still, for these utter personal tales there’s something that feels rather distant about the way Small Wonders tells these stories. There’s a cool kind of analysis to the narration that makes the film seem more like a graduate psychology thesis rather than a loving memorial to a bygone age. There’s something kind of spacey about the approach, a separation of subject and author, which is weird considering that Abecassis spent 10 years chronicling these three people. The film’s conclusion is more philosophical too seeing as how everyone closed their stores or were forced into smaller spaces. One can almost take the ending as a tribute to the power of the lost cause, which I don’t think the filmmakers were trying to convey.

There is still something to admire in Small Wonders though, and it’s that these are interesting people with interesting stories to tell. They’re stories that you don’t get out of working down an anonymous aisle at the local big box. From the helter skelter filing system to the personal touch that can only be got from people who are symbiotic with their businesses rather than cogs in the machine, there’s something admirable about those profiled in Small Wonders. I just wish that the documentary about them was able to connect better.