Please Give - Nicole Holofcener

I wish I could write the way Nicole Holofcener writes. I wish I could write the way she directs too. It’s sometimes difficult to articulate the feelings and motivations of her characters in Please Give — they contain layers of often contradictory emotions — but they elicit our immediate empathy. There is a scene, and others like it, where two sisters sit together on a couch watching television and one lays her head on the other’s shoulder; without a word of dialogue, we feel their longing, regret, and self-doubt.

Holofcener previously directed 2002’s Lovely & Amazing and 2006’s Friends with Money, and with this film cements herself as the best filmmaker I’ve encountered on the subject of female neuroses. She’s tough but compassionate, funny without indulging in Ally McBeal-like eccentricity or the casual condescension of many romantic comedies. All three films have starred Catherine Keener, who may have given a bad performance in her career but I haven’t seen it yet. In Please Give she plays Kate, a vintage furniture seller in New York City who gets her merchandise from the families of the recently deceased; she can get valuable pieces for less than they’re worth because surviving relatives are too preoccupied with grief to haggle over prices.

Kate is stricken with guilt over the way she does business, but not enough to stop. Her ambivalence is the heart of the film; we watch her pulled between self-justification — if she doesn’t do it, someone else will — and charitable overcompensation. She gives money to the homeless on her street (twenty-dollar bills, not spare change), and when she tries to volunteer at a school for special-needs children she ends up crying in a bathroom stall and asked by a girl with Down’s Syndrome if she needs help; she’s so warped by liberal guilt that she needs more comforting than she’s capable of giving.

This is a film for the recession era far more than Up in the Air was. Kate is a product of our current capitalist conflict, divided between the dog-eat-dog cynicism of the free market and the impulse to share with others, but because she is wracked with self-loathing she’s unable to help anyone, least of all herself or her family. Her teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), wants a pair of $200 jeans, but her mother refuses — not because she can’t afford them, but because she’s ashamed that she can afford them.

A parallel story follows altruism of a different kind, motivated by obligation instead of guilt, but no more satisfying to the giver. Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is a lab technician who administers mammograms and in her free time dotes over her 92-year-old grandmother Andra (Ann Guilbert), whose apartment has already been bought by Kate and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt); they live next door and plan to expand their apartment after she dies.

Andra isn’t simply cranky or lovably crabby — she’s mean. She’s lived a hard life, someone says later; because she’s elderly, no one wants to say what everyone is thinking. Rebecca’s mother committed suicide when she was fifteen, and though it would be overly simplistic to draw a direct line between her trauma and her doting, we can see its influence over her. She doesn’t want to admit how little she likes Andra. Taking care of family is what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?

Rebecca’s sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), takes the opposite approach. She’s almost as mean as her grandmother, blunt to others because the hard truth is better than a kind lie, and bitter to Andra for several reasons. One she doesn’t say but we perceive is a protective impulse; though they bicker frequently, Mary sees that her little sister is being exploited, so she gives to their scornful grandmother as good as she gets.

Holofcener is an impeccably subtle filmmaker and inspires from her actors some of their best, most perceptive performances. Her narratives are loosely structured, free-flowing, but she has a note-perfect understanding of her characters and observes with an unintrusive eye, letting us read the complex emotions on their faces instead of rigidly imposing her ideas onto them. This is only her fourth feature film, but she demonstrates confident grace behind the camera and in her scripts. Her resume also includes directing work for television series with strong female characters like Six Feet Under and Gilmore Girls, as well as four episodes of Sex and the City, a good show that went astray in its first transition to the big screen. The first Sex and the City movie, and from its promotion I fear its sequel as well, is about women reduced to frivolous trend-setters and reductive personality types. A Holofcener film is the antidote.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: