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by Matt Strachan

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, and “action is character”, then the title given to Jennifer Arnold’s documentary about the limitless possibilities of a single gesture (to riff on its tagline a little) is an acute observation on the film’s particular limitations as well as the engine powering its premise.

A Small Act focuses on the current day consequences of one Swede’s good deed in sponsoring a young Kenyan student through school. Arnold joins the young Kenyan, Chris Mburu, in adulthood – defending human rights for the United Nations after graduating from Harvard. Bulging from the generosity of the small act that proved so pivotal in his own life, Mburu has started a scholarship programme in his benefactor’s name – the Hilde Back Education Fund – and it is this organisation’s selection process, and particularly the aspirations of three young students (Kimani, Ruth and Caroline) hoping to succeed within it, that swells the film to its feature-length, present-day narrative.

But it is this balancing act – between a retrospective adherence to the film’s point of inspiration (its hook, essentially) and a reliance on related, similar circumstances to reproduce the story on camera – that dilutes each character presented to an almost minor or supporting role, muffling the film’s overall potential impact. And it is not difficult to see why Arnold felt compelled to make such a conflicted choice - Mburu is by far the most charismatic of the documentary’s characters and could’ve sat comfortably as the natural lead if it weren’t for the fact that his story is only a jumping off point for what the film ultimately documents. By contrast the three young students are the best source of drama in the film, but this drama would be much less compelling and resonant without the context of Hilde Back’s repercussive small act. So the two stories, and their multiple characters, are left to jostle for position, simultaneously strengthening and weakening one another as if caught in some Chinese finger trap of documentary cinema.

Inevitably deemphasising what should sit front and centre in any narrative, this jostle and trap forces story and character to blend into the background and allow traditionally more elusive or invisible elements to pronounce themselves: format, structure, narrative devices – the puppeteer’s strings, effectively. Unsurprisingly these vital, but ultimately inner, machinations – like human guts – don’t tend to look too pretty when they spill to the surface. And so the film reveals its episodic, almost made-for-TV, structure and its push-the-buttons musical accompaniment – ingredients that would have sat bubbling nicely beneath the surface if the story’s essentials were able to fire on all cylinders.

And so although Hilde Back’s small act drives the documentary’s premise, albeit at less than full speed, through to its natural current-day conclusion, it inadvertently stunts the growth of its cast of characters and prevents any one of them from taking the lead and pulling the audience through a completely satisfying narrative. Whether Fitzgerald was definitively right or wrong, it’s hard to deny the inextricable link between action and character, and particularly so in A Small Act’s unusual case. A single gesture may have limitless possibilities but unfortunately, and contrary to the film’s optimistic outlook, those possibilities can be restrictive as well as expansive.

Dir. Jennifer Arnold | USA 2010 | 88 mins

A Small Act is released in the UK by Co-operative and Dogwoof on 15th April 2011. Find your nearest screening here.

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