Review: The Biggest Little Farm Is an Advertisement for a World of Balance

John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm initially suggests one of those comedies in which yuppies trade their life in the city for the untamed wild so as to learn all sorts of life lessons—and indeed, more than one of this documentary’s scenes brings to mind Ron Underwood’s City Slickers. After adopting a troubled dog named Todd, John and his wife, Molly, move out of their cramped apartment onto a 200-acre patch of land an hour outside of Los Angeles, where they start a sustainable farm. John, a nature cinematographer, and Molly, a cook and food blogger, are mocked by their friends, but they prove steadfast, securing funding for the enterprise and hiring an eccentric farm expert, Alan York, who offers mystical profundities while pushing them to expand on their already big dreams.

The film’s initial scenes aren’t promising, abounding in cutesy animated montages and naïve feel-good vibes that suggest a promotional video, which The Biggest Little Farm undeniably is, as John is telling the story of his own business after all. Significant pieces of information are elided in the film’s opening act, with one question particularly left hanging: How did John and Molly secure funding for a huge and risky project with no experience in the field? Since John never addresses this question, his and Molly’s attainment of the farm feels easy, suggesting a contrived inciting incident for a fictional narrative. Also, Molly is weirdly forgotten for large portions of The Biggest Little Farm, even though this undertaking was her idea. (John’s role as the film’s protagonist doesn’t feel egocentric though, and so one wonders if Molly simply didn’t want to be on screen for much of the running time.)

Yet the film comes to life once John, Molly, and Todd settle into farm life and begin to battle the practicalities of maintaining self-sustaining habitats. The 200 acres that John and Molly purchase are initially dead, and so they, with York’s help, begin the process of rejuvenation, creating lakes, irrigation ditches, and processing plants for worm fertilizer, which is rich in nutrients. At this point in the narrative, John’s filmmaking becomes detailed, offering us the nuts-and-bolts of transporting animals onto the land and planting various fruit varietals.

A key challenge to natural farming is avoiding the use of poison, which means that farmers are constantly battling pests. John’s solutions to these problems are often exhilaratingly clever, as he uses each pest against another, encouraging a natural cycle of life. Gofers might eat roots, but they also naturally aerate the land. When the gofers get to be a problem, they can be food for snakes and owls. And when snails eat the leaves away from crops, John turns his ducks on them, who eat up thousands of the little creatures at a rapid pace.

The Biggest Little Farm is at its best, however, when functioning as nature porn. John utilizes his experience as a cinematographer to fashion intricate pillow shots of the land and its creatures, showing the minute structures of, say, a piece of fruit as insects eat it away. The filmmaker also vividly establishes the personalities of certain animals, such as Todd, a breeding pig named Emma, and a beat-up, rejected rooster called Mr. Greasy, who comes to live with Emma once her piglets have been sold. In one of the documentary’s most wrenching subplots, Emma nearly dies from the complications of having a litter, contracting a fever that interferes with her appetite. In a truly transcendent moment, the piglets roust Emma back to consciousness, and the tough old pig rises to her feet and eats again. Such a moment clarifies what John and Molly are fighting for: a world of balance, of decency.

Of course, many of us eat these animals we love, and a tougher, thornier film might’ve wrestled with that conflict. Tellingly, John never shows animals being sold or butchered, and in its third act one begins to notice gaps in The Biggest Little Farm again, which might be necessary to maintaining its aspirational sentimentality. How does this couple’s business struggles affect their relationship? This question is so pointedly ignored that it comes as a shock when we see that Molly is pregnant. And, could the shots of the animals be a little less polished, less ready for National Geographic? The film is often quite moving in spite of its evasions, suggesting a real-life Charlotte’s Web, but one wonders what an artist with a bit more distance might’ve made of such rich material.