Ten Items or Less

Hollywood slums with the lower classes in Brad Silbering’s charming two-person trifle, and the result is not as coy and condescending as it could have been. Morgan Freeman exudes schmooze playing an over-the-hill actor “researching” a part in an independent picture. He’s studying the sad sacks in a mercado in a blighted California town, but his eyes light up when he sees Scarlet (a terrific Paz Vega), an immigrant from Spain running the title aisle. The actor pumps her for her life story, learns she has a job interview to go to, and spends the rest of the film preparing her for her “audition.” Such sequences as Freeman’s marveling at a Target store (“It’s a well-kept secret,” says the dry-witted Scarlet) and leading car-wash workers in a conga line might suffer from the cutes, and the film as a whole might be hokum, but the two actors’ pas de deux has few missteps, and by the end their story of persistence registers as genuine.