PLEASE GIVE
I know I’m always going on about the lack of opportunities for women directors, and then Kathryn Bigelow had to go ahead and win the first female director Oscar as well as take best picture. Nevertheless, women directors are still few and far between in so far as regular output and name recognition, at least in America. Yet here comes one of the “regulars” Nicole Holofcener, an auterist in the tradition of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, a director who favors minimalist character studies from the neurotic female perspective, as demonstrated by first two features, Lovely and Amazing and Walking and Talking. In a similar vein, her biggest, movie star, film was Friends With Money, starring Jennifer Aniston.
Maybe it’s because no one has offered Iron Man, but it seems like Holofcener has developed a particularly and peculiarly personal language in her films that nonetheless somehow rings true. This time the experience is channeled via Kate, here played by jittery Holofcener muse, Catherine Keener. Kate/Keener is the female, wasp, gen-X tribute to some of Allen’s better characters. Kate lives in a spacious 5th avenue apartment with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) and their daughter Abby (Sarah Steele.) They recently purchased the apartment of their elderly and ailing next door neighbor, Andra (Ann Guilbert), the sort of mean old bat grandma who seems angry to still be alive when her body doesn’t work and all of her friends are already dead. Kate and Alex can afford this expensive real estate because they buy up furniture at estate sales, then mark it up and resell it at their hip little furniture shop. Whereas Woody Allen’s guilt was, perhaps, traceable to Jewish diaspora, and post World War II survival, Kate’s is of the free floating liberal and privileged sort. This prompts Kate, for example, to compulsively give money to the homeless people she passes daily, something which irritates her teenage daughter who, at one point grabs a $20 bill destined for a street denizen.
While Kate grapples with her many sources of guilt, including waiting for Andra to permanently vacate the adjacent space, we get little insight on what is actually going on there. Andra’s two granddaughters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a nerdy radiology technician, and Mary (Amanda Peet) a perpetually tanned aesthetician, take turns caring for her. In a comically awkward scene, the result of Kate’s guild, everyone sits around a dinner table at Kate and Alex’s place, inadvertently and sometimes intentionally insulting each other. Everyone knew it was a bad idea but they all showed up anyway.
What’s refreshingly different about this the kind of intimate urban fantasy with it’s 5th Avenue apartments, cabs and costly lifestyle, is the way in which it invites us into the pleasurable comforts of that world and then needles us every step of the way. No character is despicable, even Audra has a little of her softness left, yet every one of them demonstrates some irritatingly self centered, foolish, mean, and/or passively aggressive behavior. To all of those angry Republicans who have hijacked my home town symbol of the American Revolution, I offer this film as potent a symbol of our values as any Palin narrated documentary - caught between a sense of entitlement and a responsibility for the cost of our comforts.
Please Give opens April 30, 2010.
Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener; produced by Anthony Bregman; Director of Photography, Yaron Orbach; edited by Robert Frazen; music by Marcelo Zarvos. Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 90 minutes.
With: Catherine Keener (Kate); Amanda Peet (Mary); Oliver Platt (Alex); Rebecca Hall (Rebecca); Sarah Steele (Abby); Ann Guilbert (Andra) and Thomas Ian Nicholas (Eugene.)
