Please Give
Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. And Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing — Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin — but is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.
Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) stock their West Village “vintage furniture” store with mid-20th-century pieces bought from the distracted children of the recently dead. (The haughty attitude of the proprietors meets its match in the suspicion of their customers as to the value — or provenance — of the goods.) The couple also have purchased the apartment next door, waiting for its 91-year-old inhabitant, Andra (Ann Guilbert), to expire so that they might expand their domain.
Holofcener’s humorous interest in yupscale entitlement and discontent marks her as a descendant of Woody Allen. (She served as an apprentice editor on Hannah and Her Sisters.) Holofcener grew up in a Woody milieu (urban, insular, secular humanist); her relationship comedies, like those of kindred filmmaker Noah Baumbach, are largely predicated on class cluelessness and family miscommunication.
Kate and Alex have a chubby, zit-plagued adolescent daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele). Andra is looked after by her two grown grandchildren, dutiful Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a lonely radiology technician, and selfish Mary (Amanda Peet), who administers facials in a storefront spa. Briefly brought together to celebrate Andra’s birthday, the two families merge with and mirror each other in unexpected ways.
Please Give is neither as unsentimental as it sounds nor as sentimental as it might have been. The movie is filled with banter, typically concerned with three subjects: money, old age, life in New York. Holofcener can seem glib, but she has an acute sense of human neediness. The quasi-autobiographical Lovely & Amazing would be famous alone for the scene in which Emily Mortimer’s aspiring actress stands naked before a lover (and the camera), asking him to critique her physical flaws until, amply cued, he finally validates her specific body issue.
The montage of women undergoing mammograms that opens Please Give shows a similar sensitivity to female self-image, as does Holofcener’s compassionate sense of Abby’s ugly-duckling plight. Generally, however, Holofcener is a stronger writer than director, with a greater gift for riffs than characterization. Her strongest comic creation is Andra, played by Guilbert as an irascible, ignorant, self-assured sourpuss who’s stubbornly ungracious, ridiculously confident and imperious.
Hall and Peet have everything they need to develop their characters. Not so for the reliably estimable Keener. Hers is the toughest part: Kate is a canny business operator paradoxically cursed with a bleeding heart.
Kate is meant to have soul. She is too sensitive for the volunteer social work that she imagines she should perform. But there’s nothing dreamy about her yearning or charming about her weakness. Kate’s liberal guilt is about as convincing as Holofcener’s, which may be an example of the movie’s perverse honesty.
