Please Give (2010)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on June 17, 2010 @ tonymacklin.net.

Go East 50-year old woman. Go East.

Director/writer Nicole Holofcener goes back east for Please Give. It is an auspicious move.

Her last two movies were set in Los Angeles. Friends with Money (2006) was dreadful, even if you identify with vapidity and pretention. Holofcener's LA environment produced dull venality.

Holofcener has made four features -- two in LA, and two in New York City, and she directed episodes of tv's Sex and the City. She may be schizophrenic. She has just bought a home in Venice, California, but she was born, raised, and schooled in New York City. Once an eastern girl always an eastern girl.

In New York City in Please Give, her characters are still self-absorbed, but in their eastern environment they're at least slightly grounded. Their self-absorption has a universality that didn't exist in LA's shrill milieu. What they have in Please Give is a humanity that was totally absent in Friends with Money.

In Please Give, Catherine Keener -- an intrepid veteran of all four of Holofcener's films -- portrays Kate, a character who is a liberal materialist. Kate's values collide, but she is not strong enough to resolve her conflict; she can barely cope.

The practical side of her -- promoted by her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) -- buys the furniture of old people who have died leaving their children with property they don't value. Kate and Alex then sell the previously under-valued furniture for a profit at their vintage furniture store.

The spiritual side of Kate is a mess. She resists her 15-year old daughter Abby's pleas for $200 designer jeans, and gives money regularly to homeless people on the street. She tries to do public service -- e.g., for the mentally-challenged -- but emotionally she falls apart and can't function in that world. She wants to have it both ways, but she's soft-boiled in a hard-boiled world.

Kate, Alex and Abby live in an apartment next door to Andra, a 91-year old woman (Ann Morgan Guilbert). They have bought the woman's apartment and are waiting for her to die, so they can break down a wall and expand their apartment.

Andra has two granddaughters -- Rebecca (Rebecca Hal) who dutifully cares for her , and Mary (Amanda Peet) who disdains the old woman's selfish behavior.

Rebecca is a mammogram technician, and Mary works at a day spa giving massages and facials.

Holofcener is fortunate in her cast. Catherine Keener is convincing as the woman whose emotional life crashes on the shoals of caring. Oliver Platt adds humanity as the supportive but wayward husband.

Sarah Steele is effective as the pizza-faced daughter who is obsessed with those expensive jeans. Her parents -- like most parents -- are "do as I say, not as I do."

Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet are substantial as the two contrasting granddaughters. And Ann Morgan Guilbert excels as the cantankerous, aged woman, who shows that unpleasant self-absorption has no age boundaries.

Holofcener's stepfather was a producer for Woody Allen, and Nicole was a production assistant on Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982).

She studied with Marty Scorsese. Holofcener opens Please Give with a montage of breasts being mammogramed; women's breasts are squeezed, squished, and demythologized. [Perhaps this is a bit reminiscent of what Scorsese did to shaving in The Big Shave in 1967.]

Both Allen and Scorsese have a distinctive eastern (New York City) sensibility that Holofcener shares. But they are much more incisive than she is.

She does basically avoid shtik in Please Give, although she can't resist a moment of broken crockery that is much too coy.

Obviously -- like her two fellow New Yorkers -- Holofcener mines her own life (acquaintances and friends) for personal nuggets. Some -- especially in LA -- are fool's gold. The culture in which her characters founder is less shallow in New York. In Please Give Holofcener's characters still whine and moan, but their tone is less vacuous.

Holofcener's decision to not judge her characters lets them off with a slap of self-recrimination.

We understand and perhaps identify with the dilemmas a liberal materialist may face. For some, spiritual or "Christian" Capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

But until Holofcener realizes that to be human is to understand -- and to judge, her films will lack heft and impact.

An earth-shaking choice about designer jeans isn't quite enough -- not in LA or New York City.

© 2000-2023 Tony Macklin