Please Give

Nicole Holofcener, the gifted writer and director of Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely and Amazing (2001) and Friends with Money (2006) delivers her most insightful and satisfying picture yet with Please Give. This witty film of modest but unmistakably sharp-edged perception centers on four internally conflicted characters maneuvering their ways through the incongruent economic landscape of contemporary New York City.

Kate (Holofcener regular Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are an upper-middle-class couple living in a nice apartment with their teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele). They also own the adjacent apartment, which they purchased from its elderly occupant, the always-complaining Andra (Ann Guilbert), with the agreement that she can live there until she dies. This arrangement with Andra makes Kate feel like a vulture waiting for a bitter, unhappy old woman to kick the bucket so that an already spacious Manhattan apartment can become even larger. This morbidly opportunistic feeling isn’t helped by the fact that Kate and Alex make their living running a furniture store that specializes in used modern pieces that they buy at estate sales from the children of the recently deceased.

The other main characters in this small ensemble are Andra’s two granddaughters, the dour but dutiful Rebecca (Rebecca Hall in another mesmerizingly understated performance) and the sexy but cynical Mary (Amanda Peet). The lives of all six protagonists intersect in uncontrived ways via Holofcener’s casual seaming but tightly structured narrative. Holofcener is one of those writer/directors whose scripts are heavy on sharp, urbane dialogue, but—unlike so many of her contemporaries—she is able to convey a tremendous amount of information, emotion, and subtext using relativly few words. Please Give is ostensibly concerned with issues of class, status, and the responsibilities that go with one’s place in a predetermined hierarchy. Its thesis might be that altruism just as often results from self-loathing and guilt than from a generosity of spirit. But the movie also explores the frustrating ties, healing bonds, and behavioral patterns between siblings, spouses, and generations in fresh, perceptive ways.

The stepdaughter of producer Charles H. Joffe, Holofcener grew up on the sets and edit rooms of Woody Allen. She was an extra in Take the Money and Run and Sleeper, a production assistant on A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and an apprentice editor for Hannah and Her Sisters. But while Holofcener makes low-budget movies about the angst of neurotic upper-middle-class New York intellectuals, her films feel nothing like the generic output of the many Woody-wannabes that flooded art-house screens in the 1990s. And her work feels far more current and vibrant than most of what Allen himself has put out in the last decade. Holofcener possesses a singular voice and an ability to mine truth and humor out of the most seemingly mundane of situations. Her characters, especially her female characters, are always flawed, funny, deeply compelling human beings. This picture is special among her work because she’s able to mine resonate, convincing truths from thoughts most audiences have but don’t like to dwell on. She does this with such witty, appealing, and unpretentious style that Please Give feels like a gift.