Two Characters in Search of an Éxito

Ay, Dios! And I thought Spanglish had a condescending view of Hispanics. At least it attempted to have some sort of story and some type of characters. Writer/director Brad Silberling's 2006 “comedy” Ten Items or Less could not be bothered to attempt that much. Instead we get some type of experimental movie comedy whose “comic” high point had otherwise likable actor Morgan Freeman following around an elderly Mexican store clerk and imitating him in an allegedly humorous manner. And this, mind you, was supposed to be part of the funny part of the movie.

At the beginning of the film, Freeman played a character which was supposed to be a thinly disguised version of his real self and Jonah Hill played a character who could not help calling attention to the fact that we were watching a movie. Hill dropped Freeman off at a Mexican supermarket in order to let him allegedly research an upcoming movie role whereupon he promptly ran into Scarlett Morales, a Spanish store clerk played by Paz Vega. Freeman ended up hooking up with Morales for reasons that never really made sense and following her to a job interview. Along the way, they had more than few philosophical discussions but for the most part, the two characters seemed to exist merely to allow Silberling to poke fun at the banality of their surroundings, ridicule which might have been more sympathetic if Silberling had had anything particularly interesting or imaginative to say with these characters but he did not.

Instead we get a series of condescending looks at various locations in blue-collar LA followed by a lot of really patronizing dialogue. Both Morgan and the scriptwriter evidently wanted to give us the impression that there was something particularly amazing about Ms. Morales that made it worthwhile to sit through the entire movie but they never quite managed to put this across in a convincing manner -- and as a result, the movie seemed even more patronizing toward her and the other Hispanic characters than a more conventional movie would have been.

I suppose Morales’ story arc was supposed to be an allegory for every poor sap who had to spend countless hours at thankless jobs until he or she finally made it big in Hollywood but unfortunately we never get to know enough about Ms. Morales to care that much whether she succeeds or fails. And it does not help that the other people in such environments receive even less attention than Ms. Morales. If just once the script had showed sympathy for such people, I might have taken the movie more seriously. But instead I found myself acutely missing the days when Hollywood still made movies like Bachelor Mother and The Shop Around the Corner -- movies that perhaps were not the most politically correct but at least took their characters seriously enough to give them decent storylines and dialogue. Instead, Ten Items or Less treated these items as if they were kitsch best reserved for the type of people who usually go for black velvet Elvis paintings and portraits of card-playing dogs.

Oh, well. If nothing else, this movie taught me that putting more dark-skinned actors and actresses in front of the camera is not necessarily going to make for better movies if they receive no backup from the folks behind the camera. Nor was thinking outside the box necessarily going to lead to making better movies if you did not come up with better ideas. But then all this should have been obvious before I saw this movie. And it is not necessarily just me who needs to learn these lessons.