Steven Delano, and his documentary, measure up.
No Bigger Than a Minute
Directed by Steven Delano
P.O.V. series
PBS
Oct. 3
Until he was 35, Steven Delano never met anyone else who, like him, was born with a form of dwarfism. And it wasn't until 13 years later that he decided to search for some answers about an abnormality that he'd at once taken in stride and tried to ignore. That quest is the subject of his forthright and captivating film, No Bigger Than a Minute, a phrase taken from a barker's patter at a Coney Island sideshow.
Delano's career had always been behind the camera, yet he explains in his unassuming narration that dwarfism is "a kind of imposed celebrity status that dwarves don't ask for but maybe there's something to learn from."
He describes feeling like he's in his own constant film whether he likes it or not, so maybe it was natural that he'd seize control of that sentiment and actually be in his own film. Interestingly, though, his ambivalence on that point permeates the project. For while he does weave the narration around his story, in the course of the fleeting 57-minute production he constantly darts to interviews with others. He flirts ironically with the notion of his anti-glamourous glamour, even having a portrait photographer shoot him posing in period costume and stage setting, for instance as the 17th-century Spanish painter Velázquez's Dwarf Don Sebastian de Morra. But then his lens quickly zooms off for another soundbite from actor Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent); Joe Gieb, a clown and former president of Little People of America; actress Meredith Eaton; guitarist Adam Stark; and so on.
In other words, the project itself may say more about Delano than anything in the project--it is half prideful I'm small and I'm proud, and half self-effacing professional humility. And while that combination is appealing, it leaves you wanting to know more about Delano than the sketchy details we learn especially about his childhood experiences and his seemingly level-headed, encouraging parents.
We watch him head from his Denver home to his native New Bedford, Mass., where he interviews his mother, Josephine, about the days after his birth when she realized something was off. He asks her point blank whether, in retrospect, if she'd know his condition, she would have aborted him. She says no, convincingly if not enthusiastically. From his deceased father James's drinking buddies and from Steven's cousin, Kris, we picture a dad willfully undeterred, telling one and all that "You play the cards you're dealt." Delano recalls fondly that after childhood hip surgery, when he was in a body cast, his dad pushed him around the neighborhood in a modified baby carriage just to get him out of the house. And some of that can-do attitude wore off early on. As Kris puts it: "You never felt sorry for yourself. I never saw sadness in you."
But we see sadness in him, not an obvious tearful kind, but a quiet kind as he ventures to a Little People of America convention in Portland, Ore., attended by a couple thousand little people, or dwarves, or people of short stature--nomenclature remains a charged and tricky subject for all involved. Had he sought out those of similar stature early in his life, he might have found a life mate, he says. He was in love once, he confides. He is alone.
A filmmaker is naturally interested in images and representations. So the documentary is chalk full of film and TV clips featuring little people. The interviewees, like Joe Gieb, the clown, and comedian Tanyalee Davis (who refers to herself as a different kind of "eye candy") talk about how show business is at once a natural way to make a living for someone who is stared at all the time anyway, and a sort of socially embraced way to celebrate oneself. Actress Meredith Eaton, however, says she wishes that writers would think more creatively about potential roles for those of short stature and that actors with dwarfism would be more selective in their career choices.
Clips like 1938's exploitation cowboy comedy The Terror of Tinytown remind us that in our treatment of those with dwarfism, we've had no place to go but up. Scenes from Austin Powers (1997) and Me, Myself, and Irene (2000) evoke more mixed feelings, for they're surely exploitative of their little-people characters, but often at the even greater expense of their regular-sized characters, and certainly no more so than they are of, say, the British, or state troopers. The films Frankie Starlight (1995) and The Station Agent (2003) are held up as exemplary character studies, in part because they cautiously explore the dwarf characters' sexuality, and others' sexual response to them (either despite their stature or, at least in part, because of it).
Delano relates the extreme responses people have had toward him--like the crazed lady in the Boston subway who mistook him for the killer puppet Chucky in the horror series and started kicking him in the shins, or the folks on the bus who couldn't hold themselves back from hugging him. Again, it appears that Delano's belated fascination with himself and his medical condition is ambivalent--he is both appalled at the extreme associations people have when they see him, and thrilled at the extreme creativity that he and others have developed to celebrate and combat physical circumstances. He quotes the filmmaker Werner Herzog in that vein in reference to his 1970 movie Even Dwarves Started Small, and Delano self-consciously seeks out not the standard talk-show little people who are ostensibly just like the proverbial you and me in every other way, but, instead, at least some of the ones who don't blend in so well and don't want to, like the self-confident and foul-mouthed Louisiana rapper Bushwick Bill.
Whatever else he is, Delano is not Michael Moore, as highlighted in a somewhat forced sequence when he interviews Randy Newman about the songwriter's '70s hit, "Short People." Newman asks Delano if the filmmaker's going to turn him into this documentary's version of Charlton Heston in Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Newman shrugs off the song's success, explaining (yet again) that he couldn't imagine anyone taking the lyrics' persona as anything but crazy and satirical. It's a non-issue, and Delano politely demures and heads off.
Delano pokes fun at himself, in college days going off to preppy Providence College thinking that, hey, the right polo shirt and no one will notice that he's a little small and club-footed. "Whoever said the clothes made the man never shopped for his in the boys' department," he quips.
At a Denver hospital, after all these decades, he decides to determine through genetic testing which of some 200 kinds of dwarfism he has. "If you're a freak, it's advantageous to know what kind of freak you are," he explains. Then--and I love this--he has a composer base the documentary's theme tune on the mutated DNA code. Somewhere in heaven, John Cage is grinning. There's some talk by a doctor, by a scientist/author, and by media critic Dan Kennedy, whose daughter is one of the 50,000 Americans with some type of dwarfism, about whether genetic testing portends an end to the evolutionary variety that includes such mutations. That important and resonant question is left hanging in the air.
What isn't, though, are the societal revelations, and Delano's personal ones, about living with differences.
"A small revolution has happened over the course of my lifetime," he says. "Things have changed. It's OK to be a dwarf."
And I, at least, hopefully imagine a sequel, in Delano's mental film of his own life if not in another actual documentary, in which he is the romantic star, at the Little People of America convention, perhaps, or just at some Denver club, dancing with the second great love of his life--whoever that may be, and however tall.
-Alexander C. Kafka
