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Directed by Nicole Holofcener
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Please Give
Nicole
Holofcener has made some interesting films:
“Friends With Money” and “Lovely and Amazing” come to
mind. “Please Give,”
though not a bad film, seems to have imprisoned her
in a style in which each episode, each moment, is expected to have more
resonance than she has given it.
We quickly go on to other things, and so does she. Oliver
Platt (Alex) and Catherine Keener (Kate) are married and own a mid-20th-century
not-quite antique store in Manhattan, where they buy some stock from recently
deceased people, mark them up and sell them. They want to buy their
neighbor’s apartment, a 90-year-old widow with two granddaughters,
Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet). Rebecca is a radiology technician, Mary does facials at a salon. In
the course of getting to know his neighbor’s family, Alex has an affair
with Mary, and there lies one of the problems with the film: Platt is miscast
(too fat, too slobby) in the role – why would
Mary even want to sleep with him? – and we
never see whether or to what extent his adultery has consequences for his
marriage. Alex and Kate have a
15-year-old daughter, Andra, with lots of acne and
lots of teenage anger. But she
seems to be there as a plot device rather than as a human being. In
a sense, every character in “Please Give” seems to be in place
here so that Holofcener can make a movie, rather
than to be a human being. Kate
has a kind of tic: she gives money to everyone she sees on the street who appears to be homeless. She tries to volunteer at an
old-people’s home and a center for disabled teenagers, but retires to
the bathroom to cry about it without committing herself. Mary and Rebecca have problems as
sisters, but we are left to intuit just what went wrong between them. Don’t
be put off by these objections; with the exception of Mr. Platt, this is a
marvelous cast of actresses who can do no wrong. It’s the writer/director
who’s let them down. |