La beauté du geste

Greetings again from the darkness. If not for a friend's recommendation, I probably would have avoided this one on the basis of writer/director Nicole Holofcener's last film, Friends with Money. I found that to be a miserable film filled with miserable people. This one, on the other hand, is a wonderful film filled with miserable people!

OK, that is a slight simplification, but it is an extremely well written story that showcases the imperfections of people, social situations and society as a whole. Sometimes it seems the harder we try, the worse things turn out. Such is the life of Catherine Keener's character. She and her husband (Oliver Platt) run a furniture resale shop. She carries this enormous burden around because they stock the store by buying cheap from grandchildren stuck with death's aftermath ... and then reselling to arrogant metrosexual types who live for kitsch and cool. Keener spends her time trying to scrape off the guilt by doling out money and doggie bags to the homeless.

There are many interesting characters in the film and this always adds to the fun. Rebecca Hall (uptight Vicky from Vicky Cristina Barcelona) plays the dutiful granddaughter taking care of her 90 plus year old monster granny played colorfully by Ann Morgan Guilbert. Many will remember Ms. Guilbert as Dick Van Dyke's neighbor in the early 60's sitcom. Her key job in the film is to get closer to dying so that Keener and Platt can take over her apartment and expand - the ultimate dream for a NYC resident. Hall's character is the budded flower - the one just waiting to bloom as soon as the rain hits (granny dies).

The mean-spiritedness of the grandmother is matched only by the vile spewing from Amanda Peet, Hall's less than caring and trustworthy sister who is obsessed with tanning ... and the girl who "stole" her boyfriend. Peet's character often just says what she is thinking which adds dimension to most conversations! There are some terrific scenes and moments and characters in the film, but the best written scene is the dinner party. Keener and Platt invite Hall, Peet and Guilbert over in an guilt-easing attempt to be civil while waiting for Granny to kick the bucket. The scene takes on an entirely new life when Keener/Platt's daughter makes an appearance. Sarah Steele plays Abby as a smart, insightful teenager. Oh, and she is also mad at the world and bitter about her complexion and slightly pudgy build (which makes finding the right jeans a quest). The whole scene is one uncomfortable statement or moment after another. Beautiful to watch.

I could go on and on about the intricacies of the characters and their relationships with each other and outsiders, but what matters is that the film is well written and well executed. It is not some sappy, save the world rom-com, but rather a character study of what goes on in real life and in real moments. Plenty of humor, but also plenty of truth. Amazing how often those two go hand in hand.

A strong ensemble piece anchored by Catherine Keener, the movie is a funny and plausible reading of the neuroses of a functional, likable but in-pain group of working middle class New Yorkers.

What's most positive and enjoyable about the film is the desire of its characters to deal with their problems even when they're not aware they're doing it. But a natural striving to consciousness takes hold because they're all just open enough to admit they don't have all the answers. Watching them on a path that ineluctably carries them to self-awareness, and then each other, is one of the great movie pleasures of this year.

Please Give (2010)

A sharp, witty, touching, slice-of-life gem of a movie directed by Nicole Holofcener. It has some of the trappings of an Indie movie, with very ordinary people taking the leads and quirky low budget filming and music to make it undramatic.

But the cast is top notch. The leads--there are four of them in a well balanced ensemble--are nothing if not believable. Maybe most impressive as an actress is Rebecca Hall, who played Vicky in "Vicky, Christina, Barcelona," completely transforming herself into an awkward, kindly, thoughtful and slightly whining young woman. Playing her sister is a hardened and unlikable Amanda Peet, who also has a Woody Allen feather in her cap, "Melinda, Melinda."

Then there is a moderne era antique store couple, Catherine Keener (a regular in the director's films) and Oliver Platt, a comfortable couple who buy their antiques people who have just had a relative with an apartment full of stuff die. Yes, there is some black humor, hilarious stuff, and there are layers of contemporary New York life with its superficial and materialist angst, and charm. As events compound, usually with conviction, the characters become more rounded and intriguing. And sympathetic. By the end, you feel for everyone, whatever their weird and sometimes selfish cores.

If the movie seems like a cross between Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, it's not a surprise--Holofcener has directed episodes from both series. Throw in her early apprenticeship under Woody Allen, and you get the humor as well as the high standards of writing and directing, combined, that Allen inspires. "Please Give" is slight, somehow, in its intentions. It takes a view of life that isn't so strange really, and where nothing all that unusual happens--the weirdness is just a reminder that we all have weirdness in our lives--and it makes it salient. That's the magic overall, lifting everyday traits into the light where they matter. Or matter differently. With a laugh.

Don't miss it!

Nicole Holofcener is sort of an auteur, and accordingly has a following: she writes and directs her own films in pretty much her own way. She's a witty observer of current American customs and she's good with actors. She gets especially nice performances out of Catherine Keener, who seems too often relegated by other directors to secondary roles in their films but whom she features in all four of hers. These do sometimes have a TV flavor. Holofcener in fact has directed episodes of "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under," and other shows. Like a TV comedy writer, she works in short scenes with moments of pointed dialogue, a specific observation -- a twisted toe, a misshapen breast, a nasty crack. Eventually there's a bit of resolution.

In her last film, the 2006 'Friends with Money,' Holofcener manipulated a set of women ("Sex and the City" style) with different marital circumstances and levels of wealth.

This time unity of a sort is provided by a New York apartment building where the main people meet. There is just one (pretty) happily married couple, Alex and Kate (Oliver Platt and Keener), and a very blunt old lady who lives next door, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), whose apartment they have purchased. Alex and Kate have a quarrelsome teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), who's not happy with her complexion or her wardrobe. She wants a pair of jeans that costs two hundred dollars.

The old lady has two granddaughters, one of whom is mean and selfish, the other kindlier and shier.

"Please give" alludes to panhandlers, but also more widely to Kate's guilt. She is self-conscious about the fact that her business with Alex earns good money and that they are financially secure. She longs to do charitable work, though she runs crying from a center for the mentally handicapped, and her generous handouts to the homeless people on the block only seem to anger Abby. Abby thinks the money should go toward her expensive jeans. She isn't a very high minded or even pleasant young lady. But she's gong through a difficult age. So is Andra, who is infirm and in her nineties and probably not going to last long. Andra's older granddaughter Mary (a well-disguised Amanda Peet), an artificially bronzed woman who gives facials at a spa, has no such excuse. Mary is the mean and selfish sister. Her more shy and more dutiful sibling, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), does mammograms; would like a boyfriend; but drops by every day to help out her grumpy old grandmother. Guilt, self-centeredness, death, and adultery are going to rear their heads eventually. Whenever Alex or Kate see Rebecca they feel guilty because Rebecca is trying to make Andra's latter days comfortable, but Alex and Kate are just waiting for her to die so they can enlarge their apartment. This is the kind of thing Mary is only too happy to make clear to Andra, as she gets to do when, out of guilt, Kate invites the grandmother and both granddaughters to dinner. This leads to some of the movie's most deliciously uncomfortable dialogue or, if you see it that way, offensive, nasty talk. For Alex what is said doesn't matter much because he is noticing Mary. She's beautiful.

It's ingenious the way Holofcener weaves her themes in and out of scenes; but she also hits the themes too hard. It's a bit obvious how customers in Kate and Alex's Fifties ("Mid-Century") furniture shop suddenly start asking where they get their merchandise. We know the answer, and Alex answers without guilt: they buy them from the children of dead people. But Kate has to go around looking for a charitable organization to donate time to. What she ends up doing, it seems, is giving expensive jeans to Abby. And if Abby's face still has blemishes, it's brightened by her smile when she receives this bounty. The inevitable happens and Andra dies, resulting in a moment when Rebecca and Mary lie quietly and cuddle. Alex has had a roving eye, but he and Kate are one of Holofcener's happy couples. Much drolly specific and tartly rude dialogue has gone by.

But is that enough? I might tend to agree with Variety's Todd McCarthy, who wrote in a review of 'Lovely and Amazing,' that it was "Engaging, intermittently insightful but too glib to wring full value out of its subject matter." One wishes she would take something a little more seriously, go into a little more depth, scatter around her focus a little less. And if the nasty talk and mean people she chronicles don't really matter, she ought to let them drift free into out-and-out farce; or if they do matter, she ought to give them a harder time.

But that is not her way. What she gives us is a keen ear for dialogue, good roles for women, and an even-handed distribution of likable and despicable characters. 'Please Give' made me laugh out loud, especially in the first half. Then the nastiness, first of Abby, then of Andra, finally of Mary, began to add up and the action stopped being fun. Then as dialogue and incidents came to seem too calculated to be convincing, relationships and outcomes became in turn harder and harder to make any ultimate sense of.

This weakness may have developed, oddly enough, out of a greater focus. In the earliest of Holofcener's films that I've seen, the 2001 'Lovely and Amazing,' there is a collection of intrigues, on the face of them perhaps wildly unconnected, that made it fun to see what was going to happen next. This time there are no surprises, only outcomes that are anticlimactic and sentimental. Cuddling with a bitch sister: somehow that was not what I wanted.

If you view people as case studies in arrested development, then everyone has an issue, and everyone has a story. It's how each deals with his or her issue that makes things interesting in life. And when those issues interrelate to family dynamics, things can get down right convoluted, both as tragic and comic. "Please Give" is such a vehicle. Everyone's issue is not only personal but becomes a family matter at some level. And in the end there is some truth to the concept that blood is thicker than water. Like the movie "Crash" we see how seemingly random personal issues bounce off of the others in our lives, how we react to the consequences given our relative family dynamics, and how we may move on. In the center of this mini-maelstrom is Kate, whose issue of guilt appears to be the nucleus of all matters. Everything seems to spread out from there, and like a galaxy in the distant sky, things coalesce or spin off into directions brilliantly. As usual, whoever makes up the trailer for this tidy package misdirects us completely, which is why I hate trailers.....