Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Shane Meadow’s first feature starts him off more or less as he will go on, on the mean streets of the Midlands, Nottingham here in particular, focusing on a gang of shady characters headed by Jumbo (Meadows) and Mat Hand as Malc, both petty thieves, but Jumbo has the added spice of wifebeating his, er, wife, Gena Kawecka’s Ruby. Malc’s partner, Dena Smiles’s Kate has had enough of Malc’s life of crime and hearing Jumbo’s violence through the paper thin walls of the council estate, and wants to leave.
Malc’s being slowly talked round to her position over the course of some small time car-boot larceny and drinking, but there’s always that one last job, in this case, it says here, raiding a small new age store that goes disastrously, leaving Jumbo, Malc and the rest of the gang facing varying kinds of music.
When we’re putting these directorial retrospectives often the primary interest in seeing their first feature is not so much seeing how they have improved (thankfully in this case, immeasurably), but to see if they are still interested in the same themes and ideas in Space Year This Year as they were back in the dim and distant past, in this case the mid nineties, and that’s certainly the case here, Meadow’s fascination with telling the underexplored stories of the disadvantaged English working classes, while not treating it as kitchen sink drama misery porn.
He’s also someone I’d argue often more concerned with characters than driving elaborately plotted narratives, and certainly the latter half of that is on display here – there’s not a great deal to Small Time, to be honest. It might just about qualify on the first half too, if only I could make out more that half of what people were saying. As is often the case with early, microbudget films of directors, there’s a few technical issues with miking and mixing that makes it a touch difficult to understand, particularly when Meadows is using the soundtrack as a driver (another repeated motif), to the point that I gave up trying to hear what the characters were saying when music was blaring, which I think lead to missing whatever plans were made for that final heist. I felt liked I’d missed a few scenes, and I think that’s also why it’s tough to identify with or understand the characters’ actions and lives.
Small Time has been given some overly generous ratings on IMDB, to say the least, and while I won’t necessarily warn anyone away from watching it as a curiosity after viewing his later, better films, it’s one hundo percent not where you should be starting exploring his canon, unless you have a cheap wig and shellsuit fetish.