"...a laser eye for the special state that is Manhattan misery."
"Please Give" is well made and extremely unpleasant. The unpleasantness is a
measure of the actors' success in creating a few of the least likeable people to
grace the screen this year. That's one way to look at it. The other is to
recognize that Nicole Holofcener has a practiced laser eye for the special state
that is Manhattan misery. If you can see it through that lens, you may even find
it funny - which is what I'm told it's supposed to be.
These are
your new friends: a charmless, nasty, grandmother from hell (Ann Guilbert); two
granddaughters - one saintly (Rebecca Hall), one a narcissist (Amanda Peet); a
married couple - saintly wife Kate (Catherine Keener), clueless dork of a
husband Alex (Oliver Platt) and their adolescent daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), a
selfish, rude teenager.
Here's the
plot: Alex and Kate buy up the furniture of the newly dead and sell it to
customers who wander through their upper west side apartment. Suffering from
lack of space, the couple has bought the apartment next door that belongs to the
awful grandmother. It will become theirs when she dies. One of her
granddaughters can barely wait for her to do just that; the other, kindly one is
a rare mix of compassion and understanding of the human condition who takes good
care of her ungrateful granny.
The fact that
the family is financially comfortable in the most expensive city in the world
has instilled in Kate a nagging sense of guilt that makes it nearly impossible
for her to enjoy anything. As if that weren't enough, her greedy, materialistic
teenager is a constant reminder that it is a sin it is to have money.
There are two
subjects that New Yorkers have made their own. Others may talk about
relationships and real estate, but New Yorkers rarely talk about anything else.
The fact that this family wants the neighboring apartment desperately but can't
talk about it because the grandmother still breathes is a neat twist on the
dominance of the subject. Racked with guilt because of his comfortable marriage,
Alex draws minimal pleasure from his indulgence in a comically awful affair.
Holofcener,
who has no use for subtlety, unsettles us from the outset by filling the screen
with repeated images of breasts in all shapes and size being irradiated by
mammograms. The nice granddaughter is the compassionate radiologist who does
good work. In mid picture, Holofcener hits again with an intensely detailed
scene of zit popping of the spoiled adolescent. What do these scenes do for the
picture? nothing.
Whatever her
motives, she has created a gang that I would run from on the street and yet I
have the feeling that I am missing something Woody Allenesque about this
observer who trains her sharp eye on the unique brand of Manhattan loneliness:
never alone, always lonely. You decide, but the acting is sufficiently good that
I'm still angry at the whole bunch.
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