Like its title character, Little Boy will wear down your defenses and leave you a blubbering mess on the floor. Despite being as sappy as they come, you would have to be a cold-hearted cynic not to be moved by this earnest little World War II movie.
Jakob Salivati plays the precocious Pepper, aptly named Little Boy because of his diminutive stature. Most kids his age pick on him, so his only friend is his dad (Michael Rapaport, restrained and without his Brooklyn accent). Their partnership abruptly comes to a halt when Dad gets shipped off to fight in the Philippines, where he's captured as a POW.
It's not difficult to see the connections to Unbroken, especially since the film plays up the faith angle. Obviously, this is on a much smaller scale with lesser actors, but it's moving all the same. Little Boy takes his bishop's homily a little too seriously, thinking he can actually move mountains by holding a mustard seed. But his priest (Tom Wilkinson) sees the boy's faith as an opportunity to inspire others, mostly by befriending the small town's only Japanese resident (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).
Like Gran Torino, Little Boy steamrolls through some pretty heinous racism to get to its point about friendship and sacrifice, but it gets there all the same. (There's a heavy-handedness here that was absent from director Alejandro Monteverde's previous film Bella.) For a while, the movie almost seems to forget the connection between father and son in favor of breaking down racial barriers in a very obvious way.
Still, it's hard to imagine anyone walking away from Little Boy without damp eyes and touched hearts. Yes, it makes some clumsy metaphors and some curious choices (like casting Kevin James to play the slimy doctor who's interested in Little Boy's mom). But there's an earnestness that simply can't be denied.
