Snap Judgements: Please Give

Nicole Holofcener has been driving me to the cliff of insanity with her movies for years. The writer/director of such Lovely & Amazing, Walking & Talking, and Friends with Money, her films are always superbly cast but devoid of real emotion. You can always find Catherine Keener entrenched in the middle somewhere, pulling grunt duty trying to bring any emotional weight she can to Holofcener's consistent story of upper middle class W.A.S.P. angst. I look at the director as the female version of Guy Ritchie. Not that she makes action flicks, but in that if I strung all of her films together without breaks you'd never know the difference. They all look and feel the same. Please Give is no different, but in its attempt to explore the contradictions and hypocracies of its characters it is absolutely her best work to date.

Kate(Keener) and Alex(Oliver Platt) spend way too much together. Afterall they are married, with a teenage daughter suffering from bad skin and chronic insecurity. They own a high-end furniture store in Manhattan, buying up the merchandise of the deceased then marking them up to ridiculous prices for sale. It's a scummy job, but apparenly somebody's gotta do it. Adding to the yuck factor is their vulture-like hovering over their next door neighbor, an elderly woman named Andra. Kate and Alex have an agreement that when she finally kicks the bucket they get first dibs on her apartment, which will become part of an expansion. She's a feisty old goat, though, tended to by her loving granddaughter, Rebecca(Rebecca Hall). The other granddaughter, Mary(Amanda Peet), is a shallow, superficial facialist who never holds back from showing her hatred towards Andra. 

Kate doesn't know how to feel. She adores her upper class lifestyle, but simulanteously feels guilty when confronted by those who are less fortunate. Yet she continues to take advantage of those very same people. She deprives her own daughter, preferring to give money to strangers than family. Her relationship with Alex is less husband/wife and more co-worker/buddy, and she's starting to wonder if it'll ever be the way it used to be.

After about twenty minutes I was tempted to walk out of the theater, not willing to sit through another Holofcener whine fest. Then a funny thing happened and these characters started to become real. My biggest problem with her work isn't necessarily that she's a poor writer or the acting is awful, but that we're never really given a reason to care. Not that the  problems of the upper class are any less burdensome than anybody else's, but we need to be shown why we should even try to relate. These are all very shallow people, and their problems don't go beyond the surface level. Kate is the only one who recognizes her own nature, and that recognition further erodes her self-confidence. It's not a role that I'm used to seeing Catherine Keener play, which might be why it struck such a chord with me. I wish all of the other characters got the attention that Kate does. Unfortunately most of their ventures don't get much screen time and never amount to much. I'd like to say that Rebecca Hall continues her streak of stand out performances, but her character is too much the reverse of everybody else. Where they are all hatable, she's way too saintly to be believed.

Please Give isn't exactly a walk in the park. It's not cheerful at all, and most of the characters are either loathsome or pitiful. But they are fun to watch as they crash about in their shallow lives, and there's even the possibility of a happy ending if you look closely enough.