Nicole Holofcener (2001)

On the evidence of this, her second feature, and Please Give (her fourth), Nicole Holofcener has a set outlook on the world and on human relations – and a narrow illustrative range.  In Lovely & Amazing, as in the later film, she depicts women whose lives pivot on a conflict of neurotic obsessions with looking good and doing good.  Elizabeth Marks (Emily Mortimer) is an actress, anxious that she’s not getting decent roles because she’s not sufficiently sexy.  She also collects and gives a home to stray dogs.  Her fiftyish mother Jane (Brenda Blethyn), out of the socially responsible goodness of her heart, has adopted Annie (Raven Goodwin), an African-American child whose birth mother was a crack addict.  That same heart is also set on liposuction (in more ways than one – Jane foolishly hopes the surgeon might fancy her).  While she’s in hospital for the treatment, the already obese, eight-year-old Annie takes the opportunity to put on make up and have her hair straightened by Lorraine (Aunjanue Ellis), a black ‘Big Sister’ volunteer.  Jane is made to pay for her physical vanity and Elizabeth for both her vanity and her sentimental kindness to animals.  The liposuction goes seriously wrong and Jane’s hospital stay is much longer than the day surgery she expected.  Elizabeth’s latest discovery bites her and she has to have her lip stitched.  As with Please Give, there’s a lot of fractious bitterness in evidence but the score (this time by Craig Richey) supplies a softening leaven. Again it’s Catherine Keener – playing Jane’s eldest daughter Michelle (an out-of-paid-work artist) – who provides human complexity of a more substantial kind.

In Please Give the men’s parts were few and minor.  The only sizeable one was the protagonist’s flabby, unfaithful husband and Holofcener’s attitude towards him seemed more contemptuous than hostile.  She shows herself more of a misandrist in Lovely & Amazing.   It seems that the only way a man can be tolerable is if he’s almost comically innocuous – like the teenager Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), from the one-hour photo shop which Michelle is reduced to working in; or not as appalling as his character type would lead you to think – like the sex-machine egotistical actor Kevin (Dermot Mulroney).  Elizabeth does a reading with Kevin to test their ‘chemistry’ for a TV series.  After she’s failed the test, he starts a relationship with her.  (It’s striking that when Holofcener takes a negative female stereotype that’s how she stays – Elizabeth’s imperturbably insincere agent (Christine Mourad) is an example here.)  If a man is a more or less conventional husband or boyfriend, he’s liable to be a shitty bore:  Michelle’s husband (Clark Gregg) won’t have sex any more and is two-timing her; Elizabeth’s boyfriend (James Le Gros) is a humourless scientist and a deadening belittler.  The best a male can be is disappointing.  At the end of the film, when Jane is ready to come home, all three main characters do without the men who’d looked promising.  Michelle, after a late-night meeting with Jordan in her car, has been arrested for statutory rape of a minor (although we assume charges won’t be pressed).  Kevin invites Elizabeth over to his swimming pool but she decides she can do without him.  The liposuction surgeon (Michael Nouri) was happily married.

I enjoyed Lovely & Amazing more than Please Give.  One reason for that is negative:  the new movie, which I’d looked forward to seeing, left a rather dismal residue.  I was primed to be lowered by this film too – and consequently wasn’t.   There were also positive reasons, though.  In spite of the tensions in their relationships, Jane, Michelle, Elizabeth and Annie are fond of each other – there’s a sense of the resilience of family as well as sisterhood here.   The main positive is the cast.  Nicole Holofcener seems excessively dependent on the charm and talent of performers to give substance and nuances to the roles she writes but she casts shrewdly and she directs actors well.   Keener is the emotional centre of the film but she’s well supported by Brenda Blethyn and Emily Mortimer.  Jane’s anaesthetic seems to have curbed Blethyn’s enthusiasm for overdoing her characters – both she and Keener are experts in delivering sotto voce expletives.  Mortimer just about manages to prevent Elizabeth’s kookiness from grating on your nerves.  I could rarely make out what Raven Goodwin as Annie was saying but this little girl has an odd, imposing presence – she seems spiritually years older than Elizabeth (or even Jane).  Jake Gyllenhaal and Dermot Mulroney enrich the film hugely.  Mulroney manages with great skill and humour the sequence (difficult for both actors) in which the naked Elizabeth asks Kevin to appraise her:  while very experienced in seeing naked women, he increasingly enjoys the novelty of delivering a critical analysis of what he sees.  The twenty-one-year-old Gyllenhaal (Lovely & Amazing was released just a few weeks before Donnie Darko) is believable as a teenager and empathetic with the character of Jordan:  he lights up the screen immediately and the film is re-animated each time he reappears.

26 August 2010