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Sammy, an uncommonly smart twelve-year-old girl, uses her gift for mathematics and enlists her frenemies to revamp the school penny drive into a major moneymaking operation.
In a world that feels like a perpetual news cycle of hate, division, and uncertainty, an escape – any escape – can be good. A viewing of “Cents,” the feature film debut of director Christopher Boone, feels like consuming empty calories. They fill you up just long enough to leave you content, but there is very little value, nutritional or otherwise, to be found in such consumption. So it is with “Cents.” However, it does offer an easy family-friendly viewing with strong female characters that is sure to be a welcome respite from the endless slog of negativity that has permeated our media-entertainment complex.
In “Cents,” Latina middle school student Sammy (Julie Flores) – a wily preteen with a prodigious gift for mathematics – seeks to earn extra money to support herself while her mother works night shifts as a nurse practitioner and studies for medical school. After getting busted for selling gum (if there’s one thing that transcends generations, it’s middle school administrators inflicting draconian punishments for minor offenses), she sets her sights higher. Sammy seeks out the best friend of the “queen bee” popular girl who runs the popular penny drive, a program that collects one cent donations directed towards building a school for girls in Afghanistan. She convinces the girls running the penny drive to implement what is essentially a pyramid scheme: one person agrees to donate one cent a day for thirty days, and they must also convince one other person to do the same, who will in turn recruit someone else. In this way, Sammy hopes to earn millions of dollars that she and her newfound friends can embezzle, inspired by the famously misleading math question: would you rather have a million dollars at once, or one cent that is doubled every day over the course of thirty days? The answer, not obvious at first, is to take the cent that doubles every day over the course of a month, for it leads to a sum exceeding the million dollars.
Logical? Kind of. Realistic? Not at all. There are much better ways to profit from a pyramid scheme that don’t involve relying on middle school students’ altruism. Just ask Vemma, the company that exploited high school and college students for years before getting shut down by the FTC. But nonetheless, it is Sammy’s desire for economic security that drives the plot forward, as the penny drive quickly becomes a local news story and attracts far more attention than either her or her partner-in-crime, Katie Schmidt (Lillie Kolich), were anticipating. As far as flicks starring middle schoolers go, this one can be surprisingly gritty. There aren’t any clear cut happy endings in “Cents,” something I wasn’t expecting going into it. It is also strangely exciting watching Sammy’s scheme unravel, and I found myself surprisingly invested in its outcome.
Of course, “Cents” has more than its fair share of flaws. The adult actors are entirely unconvincing, and in many cases the way the child characters interact with each other are equally so (Flores’ performance is an exception, as she shines through in her role). The script is unoriginal and wooden, leaving the actors little room to exhibit any sort of independence with their characters. This project is an amateur one and was funded entirely through Kickstarter.
Despite its imperfections, this is still a worthwhile production from a first-time feature director, and that fact that it was funded through online donations honestly makes it a more impressive film. Boone clearly has some areas in which his directorial prowess can improve, but “Cents” is a fun story that the whole family can enjoy and have a worthwhile discussion about. It is not especially memorable, but is at least something different in a catalog of the same.
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