Review: Please Give

Nicole Holofcener's fourth film fails to inspire empathy for this reviewer.

By Todd Detmold
Published: May 10th, 2010 | 11:45am

Nine years after her breakthrough Lovely and Amazing, Nicole Holofcener is still spinning the wheels of upper class white guilt. With Please Give, Holofcener reunites with perennial muse Catherine Keener to further a saga of loquacious navel gazing. If Holofcener's inability to develop as an artist turns every successive picture into a repetition of themes she doesn't know how to wield, at least Please Give suggests a growing self-awareness.

Keener's central protagonist is Kate, who with husband Alex (Oliver Platt) operates a vintage resale shop through which they turn over the furniture of the deceased for big profits. Having this as her source of stability is getting to Kate, who throughout the film repeatedly makes a fool out herself in trying to give something back to the less fortunate. To the dismay of her prickly 15-year-old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) for whom she refuses to buy pricey designer jeans, Kate begins throwing fives, tens, and twenties at the street denizens of Manhattan.

Of course, Kate isn't alone in her misery. She and Alex are waiting on the old woman, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), next door to die so they can knock down the wall and double their space. In a gesture as misguided as handing cash to the homeless, they invite Andra for dinner along with her two adult granddaughters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), making for a dinner party in which everyone openly loathes everyone else at the table. Abby is humiliated by her acne, Andra and Mary are cold and tactless, and Alex is just bored (which is, incidentally, boring).

The characters intermingle in unsurprising ways—Mary works at a spa, and forms a tenuous bond with Abby when she goes in for a facial; Rebecca and Kate bond; a lackluster adulterous affair ensues. To a certain extent the film is about aging—through adolescence, through the wan years of marriage, through the end of life. In writing every character as wholly unable to deal with their respective rites of passage, Holofcener attempts to traffic in vignettes of raw human nature run amok. The result is a contrived ensemble character study in which nobody is likable and the dishonesty of the film matches the "honesty" of the dialogue shot for shot. And since nothing much happens in the film, the whole thing runs together into one long treatise on why self-involved rich folks are so difficult to make good subjects for drama.

It's likely inaccurate to label Kate as an alter ego for Holofcener herself. Rather, Holofcener is the kind of writer who, in an attempt to unite her own world view with the factual state of the thing, spreads her perspective equally among the cast of characters. This leads to arguments over nothing, tireless exposition and, ultimately, a film with almost no forward momentum. When two long-bickering characters manage to achieve a tearful emotional climax with the exchanged admission that each is "a good person," it comes across like a self-affirmation of Holofcener's, repeated assuredly into the mirror each morning at the suggestion of her therapist.

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jillrussell (over 2 years)
I wasn't a fan of Friends With Money, but I thought Lovely and Amazing was such an insightful film about women. That left me looking forward to Please Give. The lack of plot didn't bother me, and I thought the film was likable and genuinely funny in examining female characters and their motivations. I agree that most of the characters were hard to like, except for Rebecca—and I particularly enjoyed Hall's performance.