LA Weekly Review

by Tim Grierson

Nicole Conn’s harrowing documentary personalizes the hot-button topic of same-sex parenting through her own family’s story of love and perseverance. When Conn’s surrogate-birthed son, Nicholas, is born 100 days prematurely, Conn’s determination to keep the baby alive — despite her partner Gwen Baba’s reasonable objections — creates endless, agonizing nights in the hospital and a growing resentment between the two women. While the movie is gripping as it presents the 1-pound infant’s battle for survival — those first few months in the neonatal intensive-care unit are particularly painful to watch — Little Man also confronts the right-to-life questions at the heart of this human drama with a complexity rarely felt in our nation’s polarizing debate over reproductive freedom. (More slyly, the film neutralizes mainstream stereotypes about gay couples through its matter-of-fact depiction of Conn and Baba’s loving roller coaster of a relationship.) Because the material is inherently heart-wrenching, you wish Conn would ease up on the melodramatics; she allows her voice-over to creep into faux-poetic preciousness at times and includes Gregorian chants on the soundtrack to bathe the proceedings with Significance. But, in a way, such overheated theatrics accurately capture a volatile situation where emotions often overtake wisdom and self-control. Risking everything for a fragile child who may not live to see another day, Conn is exasperating and heroic in equal measure, an altogether riveting portrait of motherly devotion at its most primal.