La beauté du geste

I've heard all the clichés about New York, and I have a daughter who owns an apartment in Hell's Kitchen, so I know what I'm writing about: If you want a superior cinematic exploration of the contradictions in one of the world's great cities, then see Please Give.

Upper middle class couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) own a shop that sells mid-20th century furniture and kitschy items at prices non-Manhattanites would consider high.

As dramatically interesting is their bid to purchase an adjacent apartment as soon as the elderly grandmother dies. The death watch is the essence of the theme about shameless New Yorkers' acquisitiveness, for which, when it comes to expanding one's own apartment, anything goes. It's especially poignant to watch the liberal, goodhearted Kate give $20 bills to the homeless along the street, volunteer for work that makes her cry, give a valuable vase to a former customer she has taken advantage of, and yet wait for grandma next door to croak.

But that's where writer/director Nicole Holofcener gets it right—New York is full of life's ironic contradictions: Do good and bad in equal measure, feel bad about the bad, and go on living in one of the most glamorous cities ever crafted for the appetitive and the kind hearted. Holofcener treats the issues, from teen age angst to adult infidelity, with a dramatic restraint that allows the scenes to breathe lightly when a teenager berates her mom in public or a husband cheats on his beloved wife.

Keener is a delight with her nuanced, exemplary life, and Amanda Peet as Mary, the seductive granddaughter of the aging neighbor, is spot on in her self-centered charm. The scene in the elevator with Alex, Kate, and Mary is as uncomfortable as any director could hope.

It's all in a delightful, deconstructed New York minute, or so it seems to a former hyper Easterner now laid-back Mid-Westerner.

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' wins my vote for Best Movie of 2010 So Far. It's the funniest film I've seen in years, and it also has depth, originality and intelligence.

It tells the story of two families in middle-class Manhattan, each dealing with a range of issues. One of the most prominent themes is death and dying, but somehow the film is not a downer. Ann Guilbert's portrayal of a cranky 90-year-old is laugh-out-loud funny, as is Sarah Steele's raw and honest depiction of adolescent awkwardness.

Amanda Peet also does stand-out work as a woman on the verge of middle age still struggling to be a pretty girl.

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.