Even Dwarfs Started Small
Am I wrong thinking this might be the most joyous film Werner Herzog has ever made? Other than knowing that it was a cast entirely of little people, I was not sure what to expect. But there is a pleasure in the lives of these characters that is simply delightful to experience. That might be the strangest thing I’ve ever said about a Herzog film.
The film takes place entirely within the walls of an institution on an island in the Canary Islands, and it is about a patient uprising. The director, Hombre (Helmut Doring), has locked himself in his office with one of the patients, trying to get him to understand the predicament they are in, and occasionally going back out to tell the other patients that the police are on their way. Meanwhile, the rest of the patients are causing havoc outside, getting into the director’s private stash of nudie magazines, attacking a nearby pair of blind people, getting into the livestock, making themselves food, getting out the institution’s van, and basically trying to burn the institution down. Why? We don’t really find out, and honestly, I don’t need to; the director gives us hints of his practices, but motivation does not mean anything to Herzog, so it doesn’t to me, either.
Little people are normally a novelty item in a movie or TV show, if we’re being perfectly honest. Even the reality shows about them feel like they treat them as something other than normal. There are exceptions (“Willow,” for example, or actually, any of the “Star Wars” appearances Warwick Davis has made outside of Wicket), of course, but most of the time, they feel included for a purpose to be noticed. That is part of why “Even Dwarfs Started Small” is so fascinating to watch- by not having any normal-sized humans in the film, we see these characters as normal, and don’t even think about the fact that they are little people at all. (Of course, it can also be said that, by doing so, Herzog is treating these individuals as novelties, but it feels like a genuine attempt of showing how normal they can be to me.) We see the humanity in them, and it is entertaining to watch them go about the nature of bringing this story to life. No one performance sticks out above the others, but there are faces that stand out, and give us much to ponder as we see them in the film.
Herzog is a filmmaker who has often moved between narrative and documentary films, and I think, by doing so, he has allowed that natural show of life unfolding that documentaries provide to seep into his approach to narrative films. That’s especially evident in this period of his career, and if you told me that “Even Dwarfs Started Small” was a documentary, and Herzog was capturing an actual event, I would believe you. This feels less like a scripted story, and more like an unfolding of reality, something prevalent in many of Herzog’s best films. The most surprising part of this one, which I would say is one of his best, is that it’s also naturally entertaining, on top of that.
