Please Give

[Howard Schumann]

PLEASE GIVE

Directed by Nicole Holofcener, U.S., (2010), 90 minutes

According to Werner Erhard, guilt is a position of no responsibility. In other words, if you fail to openly acknowledge that you have acted in a way that is inconsistent with your integrity, you end up feeling guilty and beating yourself up about it. In Nicole Holofcener’s latest acerbic comedy Please Give, the main character’s lives are run by their guilt. Kate, played by Holofcener regular Catherine Keener, hates making money purchasing the belongings of the recently dead and selling them at an inflated price in her New York antique store but does it anyway and will probably continue to do it. To assuage her feelings of self-loathing, however, she hands out cash obsessively to street people but refuses to buy her cantankerous 15-year old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) a pair of expensive jeans.

Kate is not without compassion and attempts to volunteer with the handicapped and elderly but cannot handle it emotionally. The guilt, unfortunately, is spread around the household. Kate’s husband Alex (Oliver Platt) feels remorse about cheating on his wife with an attractive neighbor, Mary (Amanda Peet), who works as a facial massage therapist and has no qualms about giving Alex a facial and other kinds of massages. Like Holofcener’s 2001 film Lovely and Amazing which explored women’s responses to a culture obsessed with youth, celebrity, and physical beauty, the characters are not bad folks. In fact they are really endearing and the director provides them with a distinctive voice, one that can be sweet and full of gentle humor, but can also be acidic and unpleasant. They are not people you may feel like hanging out with but they are always real and can also be fun.

Please Give is not about the story but about the characters. Whatever story there is, however, centers on Kate and Alex’s relationship with the daughters of their 91-year-old neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) who lives next door. The daughters, Rebecca, a lab technician who gives mammograms and Mary, the massage therapist, are both unmarried and the men they associate with do not have anything nice to say about them which seems to be what you attract if you do not feel good about yourself.

Not that they are waiting for Andra to die or anything, but Kate and Alex have already bought the apartment next door and have made plans to enlarge their own apartment by breaking down the walls. Naturally Andra is full of fears, leading Abby to say to her mom that "When she sees you, she sees a vulture." Kate tries to smooth things over by inviting the old lady and her granddaughters over for a birthday party for Andra but some inappropriate remarks and Andra’s whine about her birthday cake and a nightgown she got as a present casts a pall over the proceedings. On paper, the story of some feisty rich people and their spoiled daughter may sound like something you would want to avoid. In reality, however, Please Give is exceptionally involving and highly entertaining. It is filled with sharp wit, humor and humanity, and contains some wonderful performances that light up the screen, a film that is reminiscent of Woody Allen at his best.

GRADE: A-

[Chris Knipp]

Nicely written review as always, Howard, but I have a different opinion.
I to some extent enjoyed the movie, but not as much as you seem to have done.

I can't agree with you so readily en masse that the characters are "not bad folks" and in fact "are really endearing." Certainly Abby and Kate and Alex and Rebecca are "not bad folks;" despite her ill humor Abby clearly is too young to judge. But Andra's extreme negativity is hardly admirable, even in an old lady, and Mary has no redeeming qualities. You may be right that Holofcener forgives them all, but I find it hard as a viewer to do so. Of course I would agree that Andra is understandably "full of fears", and there are hints that she was a quite good person in her earlier life. Maybe Holofcener strains too much for funny, sit-com old lady dialogue, and creates a monster when she didn't mean to.

I also don't think I would agree with you that this film is "reminiscent of Woody Allen at his best." It is far too different from Woody Allen's concerns to say that. However you're in perfectly good company. Ty Burr the film critic of the Boston Globe wrote, "Please Give is a moral comedy that feels at times like one of the late Eric Rohmer’s deceptively breezy miniatures, or a mid-period Woody Allen movie minus the fussiness."

And by the way also I found on Metacritic this quote from Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek: "I suspect nearly everyone who sees the picture will have a loud opinion about this ending, which is just one way Holofcener works her stealth magic as a filmmaker and storyteller: She doesn’t close up shop on her movie until she’s made each of us an honorary New Yorker — in other words, a person with a strong stance and something to say."

Correction: The stripping and asking the date's opinion that you attribute to Rebecca, is the gesture of Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) with a date in Lovely and Amazing. It doesn't happen in this movie.

I will add my review below.

[Chris Knipp]

Nicole Holofcener: Please Give (2010)

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/6427/pleasegive520x350.jpg
SARAH STEELE AND CATHERINE KEENER IN PLEASE GIVE

Dead people's stuff

By Chris Knipp

Nicole Holofcener is sort of an auteur, and accordingly has a following: she writes and directs her own films in pretty much her own way. She's a witty observer of current American customs and she's good with actors. She gets especially nice performances out of Catherine Keener, who seems too often relegated by other directors to secondary roles in their films but whom she features in all four of hers. These do sometimes have a TV flavor. Holofcener in fact has directed episodes of "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under," and other shows. Like a TV comedy writer, she works in short scenes with moments of pointed dialogue, a specific observation -- a twisted toe, a misshapen breast, a nasty crack. Eventually there's a bit of resolution.

In her last film, the 2006 Friends with Money (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=571&view=next), Holofcener manipulated a set of women ("Sex and the City" style) with different marital circumstances and levels of wealth.

This time unity of a sort is provided by a New York apartment building where the main people meet. There is just one pretty happily married couple, Alex and Kate (Oliver Platt and Keener), and a very blunt old lady who lives next door, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), whose apartment they have purchased. Alex and Kate have a quarrelsome teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), who's not happy with her complexion or her wardrobe. She wants a pair of jeans that costs two hundred dollars.

The old lady has two granddaughters, one of whom is mean and selfish, the other kindlier and shyer.

"Please Give" alludes to panhandlers, but also more widely to Kate's guilt. She is self-conscious about the fact that her business with Alex earns good money and that they are financially secure. She longs to do charitable work, though she runs crying from a center for the mentally handicapped, and her generous handouts to the homeless people on the block only seem to anger Abby. She thinks the money should go toward her expensive jeans. Abby isn't a very high minded or even pleasant young lady, but she's going through a difficult age. So is Andra, who is infirm and in her nineties and probably not going to last long. Andra's older granddaughter Mary (a well-disguised Amanda Peet), an artificially bronzed woman who gives facials at a spa, has no such excuse. Mary is the mean and selfish one. Her more shy and more dutiful sister Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) does mammograms; would like a boyfriend; but drops by every day to help out her grumpy old grandmother. Guilt, self-centeredness, death, and adultery are going to rear their heads eventually. Whenever Alex or Kate see Rebecca they feel guilty because Rebecca is trying to make Andra's latter days comfortable, but Alex and Kate are just waiting for her to die so they can enlarge their apartment. This is the kind of thing Mary is only too happy to make clear to Andra, as she gets to do when, out of guilt, Kate invites the grandmother and both granddaughters to dinner. This leads to some of the movie's most deliciously uncomfortable dialogue or, if you see it that way, offensive, nasty talk. For Alex what is said doesn't matter much because he is noticing Mary. She's beautiful.

It's ingenious the way Holofcener weaves her themes in and out of scenes; but she also hits the themes too hard. It's a bit obvious how customers in Kate and Alex's Fifties ("Mid-Century") furniture shop suddenly start asking where they get their merchandise. We know the answer, and Alex answers without guilt: they buy them from the children of dead people. But Kate has to go around looking for a charitable organization to donate time to. What she ends up doing, it seems, is giving expensive jeans to Abby. And if Abby's face still has blemishes, it's brightened by her smile. The inevitable happens and Andra dies, resulting in a moment when Rebecca and Mary lie quietly and cuddle. Alex has had a roving eye, but he and Kate are one of Holofcener's happy couples. Much drolly specific and tartly rude dialogue has gone by.

But is that enough? I might tend to agree with Variety's Todd McCarthy, who wrote in a review (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117798806.html?categoryid=1401&cs=1&p=0)of Lovely and Amazing, that it was "Engaging, intermittently insightful but too glib to wring full value out of its subject matter." One wishes she would take something a little more seriously, go into a little more depth, scatter around her focus a little less. And if the nasty talk and mean people she chronicles don't really matter, she ought to let them drift free into out-and-out farce; or if they do matter, she ought to give them a harder time. But that is not her way. What she gives us is a keen ear for dialogue, good roles for women, and an even-handed distribution of likable and despicable characters. Please Give made me laugh out loud, especially in the first half. Then the nastiness, first of Abby, then of Andra, finally of Mary, began to add up and the action stopped being fun. Then as dialogue and incidents came to seem too calculated to be convincing, relationships and outcomes became in turn harder and harder to make any ultimate sense of.

This weakness may have developed, oddly enough, out of a greater focus. In the earliest of Holofcener's films that I've seen, her 2001 Lovely and Amazing, there is a collection of intrigues, on the face of them perhaps wildly unconnected, that made it fun to see what was going to happen next. This time there are no surprises, only outcomes that are anticlimactic and sentimental. Cuddling with a bitch sister: somehow that was not what I wanted.

[oscar jubis]

I am still thinking about the meanings and relative merits of Please Give. One central theme of the film revolves around the feelings a reasonably well-off person may have about the way she makes her money. In a way, this is an issue that implicates (or should implicate) the majority of people who go to the movies. The simple act of purchasing a pair of jeans makes the buyer complicit in a global system of economic oppression. Alex and Kate's business is analogous to all kinds of economic exchanges that take place in today's society. I sympathize with Kate's guilt and her feeling that she must compensate for her taking and privilege by making some kind of contribution to society. What do Please Give and Nicole Holofcener mean by showing how Kate's efforts to this end are ineffectual and/or frustrating? What does Kate's failure to give say about herself and her social class? In the final scene, Kate capitulates to her daughter's wishes and spends over $200 on a pair of jeans. Why would Holofcener close her film on this note? Is it a sort-of epiphany?

[Howard Schumann]

Thanks for commenting Oscar. I am unable to respond because of some recent medical issues but hope to be able to answer in the near future. Thanks for understanding.

Howard

[oscar jubis]

Thanks for your sharing your review with readers here. Best wishes. Hope you feel better soon, Howard.