The Ten Earns Less Than a Perfect Score

I was actually a humble extra in "The Ten". I wore a maroon shirt and screamed my lungs out for the finale of the piece. So I was looking forward to seeing if I made the final cut.

But when the only two shots of the film containing us extras rolled, they came and went so quickly, their presence slight. I saw something resembling what I was looking for, I just couldn't be sure if I'd found my goal, or if I'd looked at the wrong part of the frame, or if it wasn't there at all.

Curiously enough, this about describes my attitude toward the film as well.

"The Ten" takes a fantastic concept and walks with it rather than running. An anthology of loosely connected shorts based on the Ten Commandments, the experience is akin to watching an entire season of a TV sketch comedy show in a movie theater. The way that various characters weave in and out from story to story is interesting and the instances of repetition and difference make for an agreeably structured film, at once loosely relaxed and tightly wound.

Where "The Ten" slips up, then, is the comedy. If a film is to be made out of ten short pieces, any piece not pulling its weight becomes a serious liability. Director David Wain frontloads us with one of the best bits to start, an outlandish (or maybe all too recognizable) tale of an unlikely celebrity's rise to fame and fall from grace after an entirely different kind of fall. The second sketch is pretty good too, getting the most out of a running gag involving a subtitled Spanish narrator. The high point of the anthology, however, is a parable of suburban one-upmanship informing us that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's CAT scan machine.

It's unfortunate that not all the parts of the puzzle can keep the energy going, with an interminable domestic drama about 'prison wives' being the real groaner, and Winona Ryder's lust for a ventriloquist's dummy being far funnier on paper than onscreen. Although the humor flags, Wain and his team prove themselves able stylists, confidently setting the mood whether it be romance in remote Mexico or a sunny Sunday afternoon on the streets of New York. Each segment cleverly begins with a shot that not only gives us a sense of time, place and emotion but textually links us to the commandment about to be broken.

While "The Ten"'s less accomplished segments doom it to an eerie sense of being stuck at a student film festival, the hodgepodge is interestingly structured enough to merit a look. Although not the most satisfying film, it will doubtless earn a place in the hearts of fans of independent comedy.