Reviewed by Jacob Powell

Little Fish. Small time. Small fry. Those little plastic ‘bottles’ filled with soy sauce you’ll find at any number of sushi outlets – though in this film the ‘little fish’ come filled with a more ‘expensive’ condiment. A pun, seemingly without end, Little Fish works well as the title for this very enjoyable piece of cinema. Forget ‘big fish in a little pond’ or even ‘little fish in a wide ocean’. This is more like ‘little fish in an even smaller, muddy, weed choked pool’.


Little Fish outlines well the underwhelming struggle that is the life of Tracy Heart (Blanchett), a recovering heroin addict. Despite having kicked the habit, a few years on life is not all she hopes it might be. Managing a local video store isn’t providing her quite enough motivation to stay clean so she banks her hopes on more interesting plans to set up her own business. You get the sense that these plans, even if realised, may not actually resolve her struggle.

Add to the mix a brother who’s on a similar journey – in reverse, a mother who feels the already threadbare fabric of her family stretched to tearing, and an apparently redeemed ex-drug dealer/boyfriend, and you’ve got more than enough possibilities to fill a couple of hours.

The major trouble for Tracy is that her past keeps reaching into her present; messing with her head, her situation, and her relationships. We are reminded that life is a single ongoing enterprise, not a discrete set of disconnected memories - as much as we might sometimes wish this were the case.

Jacqueline Perske and Rowan Woods are a writer-director team more experienced in television than feature films. In 2004 they collaborated on the Australian drama series, Fireflies, which, aside from the rural setting, had a ‘slice of life’ feel similar to Little Fish. In the latter, they weave together threads of a story that could be a ‘fly on the wall’ of your own life. Apparently Little Fish holds many more truisms for those who have done some time in Sydney.

Not held together by an elaborate plot, this finely written piece of drama is primarily about character development and interaction. Almost every element is believable. The family dynamic is familiar, the setting could be a place where you’ve lived, and the inner turmoil, circumstantial details aside, a likeness of your own personal demons.

The cast are all on finest form in this film, delivering the kind of restrained performances that firmly steered it away from becoming the kind of ‘gritty gansta’ flick that a Hollywood director might have been tempted to make, with half of the ensemble cast gunning for an Oscar.

Little Fish is not the kind of movie where you’d say that Cate Blanchett steals the show, and the film is the better for it. Those who hold the reasonable fear that at some stage she may be told that she has “been living two lives” will be pleasantly surprised that “Agent Smith” is nowhere to be seen. Hugo Weaving, along with Sam Neil, Noni Hazlehurst, Joel Tobeck, and even Martin Henderson are right on the money. The only mild disappointment is Dustin Nguyen’s bizarrely confused accent. Clearly he is struggling with an Australian sound. The fact that he was playing a Vietnamese-Australian who’d spent the last four years in Canada doesn’t quite cover the shocker he’s having. I suppose it can’t all be 21 Jump St.

Oh, and keep an eye open for the pleasant little cameo from New Zealand singer/songwriter Bic Runga.

Not once in the (almost) two hours of runtime did I find my interest flagging, which makes this a top effort for a slow-to-mid paced character drama. Hopefully it will be well received by distributors and audiences in the Northern hemisphere. They should be able to find something to connect with in the honest humanity captured in this film.

Little Fish manages to achieve a harmony between production and plot. Characters, story, cinematography and editing pull together so well that every element oozes a single cohesive aesthetic. A cinematic ‘Voltron’ if you will – just without the flashy bits and somewhat gone to seed.