Nicole Holofcener (2010)

Slender and acrid – the combination makes Please Give a dispiriting movie.  All the way through, the music by Marcelo Zarvos is thinly, wryly hopeful – it contradicts the harshness of the hostile verbal exchanges and the hurt that the characters do to each other.   Kate and Alex live in New York City with their teenage daughter Abby.  They run a furniture business; their stock is bought from people who are winding up the estate of their recently deceased parents or partners.  Kate and Alex have bought the apartment next to their own and are waiting for its elderly tenant Andra to die.  One of their clients mutters that they’re ‘ambulance chasers’ – Kate tries to assuage her guilt by demonstrating a social conscience, anxiously and clumsily.  Andra has two diametrically opposed granddaughters whose jobs reflect their moral substance, or lack of it:  conscientious, caring Rebecca is a breast cancer radiographer; brittle, selfish Mary is a cosmetologist.  At its best Nicole Holofcener’s writing has a Woody Allenish wit.  Leaving a ritzy restaurant with Alex and Abby, Kate – who takes pity on street people automatically – sees a black man standing outside and presses money into his hand.  He informs her, with puzzled irritation, that he’s in the queue for a table.  There are times when Holofcener’s direction of the cast – the sense we get of overhearing conversations rather than of hearing actors projecting lines – also calls to mind Robert Altman, albeit thinly-textured Altman.   But Please Give is too schematic and – although there’s a lot in it about death – too shallow to be satisfying.

In this film the people too often say incredibly candid things to one another – most notably Mary, who reminds Andra, not succinctly, that she hasn’t long to live.   The bits involving a Latino couple in another adjacent apartment are horribly harsh not because they’re incisive but because the nastiness seems mechanical.  It’s true that these eruptions of malice have impact because they interrupt other characters’ attempts at polite conversation or decent behaviour but Holofcener doesn’t follow this through by making comedy or drama out of the fact that the nicer people prefer to pretend that the cruel words never got said.  The most interesting part of Please Give comes when Kate acts on her need to do more to salve her conscience, through voluntary work.  She goes to an old people’s home but she can’t be upbeat or ignore the insistent atmosphere of impending death.  The woman who interviews Kate stresses the importance of keeping conversation with the geriatrics ‘light’; Kate thinks that death ‘surely needs to be talked about’.   Then she tries a centre for teenagers with Down’s syndrome etc:  their conditions reduce her to helpless tears.   It’s an advantage that the actress who plays Kate is one who seems incapable of falseness – and Catherine Keener is particularly good in these sequences.  It’s frustrating, though, that Holofcener doesn’t go further in exploring the selfishness of Kate’s altruism.   The film ends with Andra’s funeral and with Kate relenting and allowing Abby get the $200 jeans she covets.  Unless I missed it, Holofcener skates over the question of what will happen now to the furniture business – or whether Kate can take a break by concentrating her energies on how to do up the now vacant apartment next door.   She seems anyway to have learned that generosity begins at home – and that that may be a safer option.  (The exhortation of the film’s title has multiple meanings.)

Rebecca Hall (Rebecca) is remarkably different from role to role but, so far, consistently admirable:  she really thinks her characters out.  One thing that stays in your mind after watching Hall is her height, and how it can seem both heroic and comical, although the comedy here is pretty broad when Rebecca is paired off with a very short man – Eugene, the nephew of one of her breast cancer patients.  As Abby, whose brain and tongue are in better shape than her skin, Sarah Steele has a nice emotional range.  You want more of Rebecca’s pedantic, short-lived blind date (Paul Sparks) and Eugene (Thomas Ian Nicholas) – thanks to the actors rather than the way their roles are written.  You want less of the unremittingly unkind Mary, even though you can’t really blame Amanda Peet:  Holofcener gives her no scope for being anything but vicious.  Ann Guilbert’s acidity as Andra seems meant to show us how Mary inherited her spitefulness.  Refusing to sentimentalise the old woman may be good in theory but, because she is old (the actress is in her early eighties), you can’t help feeling sorry for what she’s subjected to.  Oliver Platt is amusing enough as Alex but his character isn’t well developed and the affair between Alex and Mary, and Abby’s discovery of it when she goes to Mary for a facial, is the clumsiest episode in the picture.  Nicole Holofcener really has it in for Mary – so much so that she won’t even let her be competent at her all-on-the-surface job.  After an hour of Mary’s treatment, Abby’s face is even more of a mess than it was before.

28 June 2010