10 Items or Less

10 Items or Less is a very strange little movie. And by little, I mean short. Of the 82 minute run time only about 65-71 minutes are actually story, the rest being taken up with the opening and closing credits. The result feels more like an elongated episode of a television show rather than a complete cinematic experience. This isn’t just a length thing, either. It is also reflected in the content.

In 10 Items or Less, not a lot happens. An aging actor researching a role (that would bring him out of retirement) takes a platonic liking to a sales clerk he meets at a grocery store and he follows her around for the day offering her advice and encouragement through her struggles. In exchange, he gets the confidence he needs to return to acting. They buy some clothes, go to a car wash, have a confrontation with her slimy estranged husband, and other odds and ends until, without much crescendo or fanfare, the day is over and so is the movie.

Classically, story structure involves characters who want something and how they manage the things that stand between them and that desire. Whether you follow Campbell’s monomyth, Dan Harmon’s story circle, or Aristotle’s intention and obstacle (as expressed in The Poetics) this basic structure is everywhere, for good reason. It is largely absent here, though. The grocery clerk does have goals for her life, which drive the action forward, but the obstacles to getting there are too flimsy and easily dispatched. The actor has very little going on at all, except a few internal struggles that are understated to the point of being practically invisible.

I think the intention was to make a film with the meandering, slice of life feel of some of Richard Linklater’s films, such as Dazed and Confused or Slacker. Those films, however, are able to shift from group to group or clique to clique as the roving omniscient point of view of the camera drops one mini-narrative and picks up another as things become stale here or get interesting there. Linklater utilizes an ensemble cast to weave a rich tapestry expressing a more holistic look at a period in time or a city and its residents. 10 Items or Less is entirely pegged to two characters so we just have to sit with them throughout. Instead of getting a collage of semi-interesting vignettes that make a very interesting whole, we get a sequence of semi-interesting vignettes that make a less than engaging whole.

One thing that salvages the less than stellar script is the two leads. Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega make this unlikely day of bonding work through sheer force of charisma. The movie does very little to justify why these two wildly different people would spend an entire day together doing random errands but the two leads make the completely improbable relationship almost believable through their performances. The movie hangs a lampshade on the fact that this friendship is a one day aberration, doomed from the start by the pair’s massively divergent lives and lifestyles, but their chemistry is so good and the movie so short, you are almost left wishing this was just an episode of a television show and you could see what happens to them next. It would also make the film’s emptier moments feel like part of a slow burn, like many of the early episodes of The Office, rather than a whole lot of nothing that doesn’t really go anywhere.

Oscar Wilde once said that drama is life with all the boring bits cut out. 10 Items or Less seems a bit like life with most of the boring bits left in. If you are interested in an indie filmmaker’s unique approach to telling a slice of life story, this may not bother you. If you are more interested in the tried and true storytelling conventions that underpin basically every great piece of writing for hundreds of years, this movie may bore you. Either way, it is quite short so if you’re enjoying yourself it doesn’t overstay its welcome and if you are not it is over mercifully quick.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in an indie filmmaker’s unique approach to telling a slice of life story.

Would Not Recommend: If you are more interested in the tried and true storytelling conventions that underpin basically every great piece of writing for hundreds of years.