Review of 10 Items or Less (2006) by Edith N — 07 Mar 2009

Time is elastic in movies. Partway through the movie, Scarlet (Paz Vega) tells Him (Morgan Freeman, who never gets a character name) that she has an hour until her interview. That hour stretches like taffy. Things happen in it that would not fit in a real hour, even though less than an hour of onscreen time elapses. The movie is not remotely set in real time--the time in, say, [i]High Noon[/i] passes at one second per second, after all--but it is that hour that we are watching, really, and the other time of the movie almost doesn't matter. Still, hardly anyone can properly wander Target, acquiring the things He acquires, in an hour. A proper Target wander, including any mandatory purchase of more than maybe laundry detergent, is going to take maybe an hour and a half if you're doing it right, and they do a lot more than just that.

He is making a movie. A little independent thing; we aren't really given a huge amount of detail about it. He hasn't worked in four years, and he definitely doesn't think of it as a comeback, but it's a movie. So he goes to a crappy supermarket in Carson, California (I know where it is, but probably very few of you do), to observe what real supermarket employees are like. He becomes captivated by Scarlet, who runs the 10 Items or Less (Fewer! Fewer!) lane. He cannot contact Packy (Jonah Hill), his ride, and he ends up leaving with Scarlet instead. She has a job interview, one which terrifies her, coming up, a not-quite-ex-husband whose new girlfriend is pregant, and she agrees to drive Him home to Brentwood anyway. But first, He makes her go to her job interview, and He coaches her all the way. He gets her new clothes, a carwash, lunch, confidence. What she gives Him is less tangible.

He is completely out of touch. He thinks of jobs as parts. All of them. He says he's casting Scarlet as an office worker, but it's a real job that she really wants to get. Working in the supermarket? That's a real job that she really has. It's not an act, but it's how he thinks of it. He's not the world's most successful actor--He's no Morgan Freeman. Scarlet is a lot more grounded, but it makes her a lot more scared. He seems quite confident that His new movie is going to be a success for him. All through the movie, people keep coming up to Him and saying, "You're Him, right?" Half of them can name movies He's been in, though they generally don't by name. But he has no idea what a Target is.

This is a really simple film. For the most part, we're looking at two people. They go to Target. They go to Arby's. They go to a carwash. They go to an office. (No product placement fees were paid. It was just cheaper to go to real places than to set up fake ones.) He seems, for all His naïveté, to genuinely love people and what they do. He becomes one with the carwash guys--another sequence that takes longer than it could in the real world but which really works. He imitates Lee (Kumar Pallana), the manager at the supermarket, but it doesn't come across as mean-spirited. It's just what this guy does. He is other people for a living, and part of that, to Him, is getting to know as many of them as He can. When Scarlet asks if He has to talk to everyone, He seems surprised by the question. Of course He does. What else is there to do?

I really liked this movie. I actually laughed in a couple of places, but the place I laughed loudest was the Danny DeVito/Rhea Perlman cameo. Scarlet is driving Him home, and as they are stopped at a light, He notices that "Big D" is in the car next to them. He waves an Icee cup in greeting, then offers to race them to the next light. They speed off, and Big D just sort of sits there. Rhea Perlman says, "I'm going to call his wife," and he responds, "No, you're not," and we move on. It's this nothing little moment, and it really encapsulated the whole movie for me. It really was such a throwaway moment. We didn't need it. We didn't need the moment of Him sitting placidly in a Target, telling the women how the clothes looked on them. Really, we didn't need about half the movie. It's made up of little moments. That may well be what I liked best about it.