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Reviewed by Carla Blackmar
Though it probably won’t be coming to a theater near you anytime
soon, in a perfect world Nick Weiss’ new short film “Free
Samples” would spice up the holiday movie lineup with its
nicely balanced mix of substance and froth. Weiss’ clever
new parable about the injustices of goods allocation revisits one
of those A-list human problems we like to try to think about as
the holidays approach, but often check off our list after watching
“A Singing Christmas Carol on Ice” or some such nonsense
on network TV. In the case of “Free Samples,” though,
the gloves are off, and the setting less comfortably remote.
The idea for the film was born from an experience that would be
familiar to most urban-dwelling yuppies; free sample day at the
upscale supermarket. In a not-so distant time in his life, filmmaker
Weiss was able to satisfy a significant portion of his weekend caloric
demand by trolling Whole Foods market on Sunday. This led Weiss
to wonder what it would be like if someone were to truly take the
food industry up on the offer of indiscriminate generosity it presents
on Free Sample Day. He fleshes out this scenario in his film, where
a delightfully amiable hobo named Milton (Peter O’Leary),
discovers the free samples section of the local market and ultimately
takes up residence in its glow, living like a man shipwrecked on
a tropical island littered with fruit. This earthly paradise meets
its sad end when it turns out that the horn of capitalist plenty
is not so deep as the free samples suggested it might be, and as
the aptly-named Milton learns to become dissatisfied with having
enough.
In telling the story, Weiss’s and O’Leary take up where
Chaplain left off. Shot without synch sound on black and white film
stock, the movie is something of a homage. Just as “Modern
Times” shows a resilient Chaplin rebounding like an animated
character after he is repeatedly trounced by the cogs and sprockets
of the industrial age, O’Leary’s Milton floats and bobs
through the upscale supermarket, flaunting the well-established
but unspoken rules of consumer behavior on his way. O’Leary
is an inheritor of Chaplin’s gifts for physical humor and
comic improvisation, and there is something cathartic about watching
Milton pop one brie-encrusted cracker after another into his mouth
as the store clerks look on; we are reminded of the secret awe we
all feel at the plenty of a well-stocked supermarket, and of our
own well-checked impulse to go skating down the isles, gorging in
its cornucopia.
Unlike Chaplin movies where the non-Chaplin main characters tend
to fade into black and white obscurity in the shadow of Chaplin’s
antics, the supporting actors and actresses in Free Samples hold
the screen. The kindly store manager (Rick Winterson) is the paradigm
of good customer service; so anxious to please and so non-confrontational
as to let Milton camp out for weeks, and to suggest to him the whole
letter-writing scheme; after all, the customer is always right.
The clerk who is Milton’s love interest (Allison Kiessling),
is entirely loveable in her role, just as Milton’s rivals
(a stocker who is after Milton’s girl, played by Jory Raphael,
and Milton’s main eating competition, played by Tracey Field)
are comically absorbed in their own subplots, always just slightly
more annoyed by Milton than Milton is by them.
The visual delight
of Free Sample’s expressive players is greatly enhanced by
the film’s innovative soundtrack, written, designed and preformed
by Weiss himself. If the movies of the silent film era employed
title cards to explicate the screen action, in Free Samples it is
the sound design that does the explaining. While the score seems
to have been influenced by the rich inheritance of Chaplin, Keaton
and early cartoons, the soundtrack also includes an elaborate layer
of hyper-real Foleyed sound that accentuates the comic action. The
sumptuousness of the sound explains the initial gravitational pull
of the supermarket paradise; from the tiptoe piano of Milton’s
cautious entry and to the flurried sweep of strings as he makes
his way to a life of material comfort. It also explains the moment
when things take a turn for the worse; the Foleyed slurping and
gulping of hungry people, greedy and loosed upon the seeming plenty
of the market has a palpable grotesqueness.
Weiss artfully
uses all of these tools to tell what is essentially the classic
tale of paradise found, and then lost again on account of human
greed. The supermarket world of light and plenty has a hypnotic
effect on Milton; inspiring hallucinogenic dreams of the perfect
life, where food and love and delight are all wrapped up into a
complete package. Typically, though, one small taste of the paradise
makes him crave more and more of it, and he ultimately pushes the
boundaries of promotional generosity too far.
Simple as the plotline is, there is a small ambiguity about who
is really at fault for this fall from grace. Is it Milton, for craving
more and more, or is it the supermarket that introduced him to new
cravings, one free sample at a time? Reading the story in the newspaper
we might scapegoat the usual suspect and blame the bum and his lack
of self control. The way Free Samples tells it, though, we have
to think twice about who’s the robber and who’s the
robbed.
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