Sentimento de Culpa

Please Give (2010) was written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. It's a very New York City kind of movie. The plot revolves around the purchase of an apartment by two urban professionals. (They're not that young, so they're not yuppies, although they probably were yuppies in their day.) At present, they make an apparently excellent living buying up old "classic" furniture, and reselling it in their storeroom. Catherine Keener plays Kate, the wife, and Oliver Platt is her husband Alex.

The problem with the purchase of the apartment is that it's still occupied by an older woman, and the agreement is that she will live there until she dies. Into the mix come the woman's two granddaughters--Rebecca Hall as Rebecca, the "plain" sister, and Amanda Peet as Mary, the gorgeous sister. (Rebecca Hall is only plain by Hollywood standards, and Amanda Peet is gorgeous by those same standards.)

The film has several plot threads moving forward simultaneously, but the one that interested me the most was Kate's ambivalence about her source of income. Obviously, if you're selling any used furniture--classic or otherwise--you have to buy low and sell high. However, Kate is clearly guilt-ridden about making money because she knows furniture value and the sellers--usually children of a recently deceased parent--don't know these values.

She also feels guilty about street people, and tends to give them ten- or twenty-dollar bills as she walks along the street. She really wants to help disadvantaged people, and checks out a residence for the frail elderly and a day program for developmentally disabled people to see if she can volunteer.

Catherine Keener is an appealing actor, and her character is basically likable. However, as I thought about it, Kate's guilt doesn't lead to any really effective action. Yes, she agonizes about the furniture, but she buys and sells it anyway. And, although her motivation to help the less fortunate is clear, she doesn't actually accept the volunteer positions. She thinks about them, and she cries, but she doesn't really do anything. Still, you can't deny the honesty of her emotions.

This is a movie in which, objectively, nothing truly major happens. However, the characters are changed by the events in the film. They are imperfect and they don't become perfect, but they're interesting and you care about them.

As I wrote at the beginning of the review, this is a very New York City kind of movie. It crackles with realistic NYC atmosphere, and you get a real sense of the city. I could almost feel myself walking along the sidewalk with Kate or Alex.

All in all, I think this is definitely a film worth seeing, and it will work well on DVD. My guess is that opinions about this movie will vary tremendously. I liked it, but others may have equally compelling reasons to dislike it. See it yourself and make your own decision.

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.....

Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Keener mark their fourth collaboration* with "Please Give", showing the contrasts in a New York couple's life. Kate (Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) run a furniture shop selling objects that they have collected at estate sales. In the apartment next to theirs, elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert, better known as Millie on "The Dick Van Dyke Show") has moved in with her granddaughters, the benevolent Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the mean-spirited Mary (Amanda Peet). As Kate, Alex, and their daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) get to know Andra, Rebecca and Mary, Kate begins to have doubts about how her own family lives its life. Kate always makes an effort to give money to the homeless, while Sarah doesn't seem to appreciate everything that she has.

The movie does a great job with character development. From the start, we immediately know that Andra always says exactly what she thinks, and that Mary doesn't have a care in the world. Specifically, there's the dichotomy in Kate's attitude towards things: she does everything possible to be a good Samaritan, but eagerly awaits Andra's passing. Is Kate really the person who she sees herself as? All in all, I highly recommend "Please Give". It just might help you realize your own flaws. Also starring Kevin Corrigan and Thomas Ian Nichols.

*I actually haven't seen any of Holofcener's other movies. I guess that I'll have to.

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.

"Please Give" is an independent, character drama. What I loved about this film was the interesting array of characters that it presented.

The characters that were on display for us to watch were all well written, fully-developed, interesting and funny as they each struggled with their moral dilemmas. I found myself being able to relate to all of them in one way or another.

The writer also leaves enough to your imagination so you can decide how much these characters evolved or learned over the course of the film. As you think about them, you find yourself applying these lessons to your own life.

The lack of plot leaves you wanting more because the best movies are usually able to deliver both plot and great characters. Although this is not one of the top echelon of movies, the compelling characters makes this better than most films you'll be able to find today.