LITTLE ROCK — I hesitate to say Nicole Holofcener makes “women’s movies,” for I understand how such a characterization could be taken as a kind of ghettoization, a way of dismissing her movies as slight little things with which serious moviegoers needn’t bother.
What I want to emphasize is that Holofcener has a remarkable way with female characters - she gives them more than quirks and “instincts” but imbues them with complex and often Machiavellian motives. In other words, Holofcener treats her women as characters independent of the men who may or may not be in their lives.
And this is probably why I like her movies and feel a little ambivalent about them; she knows her characters and gives them little human madnesses. She has a novelistic eye for detail but also a sort of involuted shrewdness that can read as solipsism. Her worlds are closed cultures populated by very specific types of people - the same sort of intelligent urban neurotics who show up in the movies of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach.
And while I generally like those kinds of movies, I understand why some people are alienated by them. Their characters tend to live privileged lives in big cities and worry about things that might seem silly to some of us. Please Give, for instance, is a movie about liberal guilt and fantastically expensive real estate that could only be set in a relatively rarefied New York neighborhood.
Kate and Alex (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt) are a married couple of reasonably long duration living in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They own an antique store that deals mostly in midcentury furniture harvested from estate sales; business is booming because the heirs rarely understand that what they perceive as evidence of their late grandparents’ awful taste is in vogue with Village retrosexuals.
Their success is just one of the myriad things that Kate and Alex feel guilty about; Kate regularly hands out $20 bills to panhandlers in an attempt to expiate this guilt, a habit that incurs the wrath of her dumpy 15-year-old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele). Maybe the biggest thing she feels guilty about is that she and Alex have recently bought the apartment next door, into which they plan to expand.
The problem with this planis that the apartment is currently occupied by a disagreeable old woman, Andra (Ann Guilbert), who is being looked after by her two granddaughters, Mary (Amanda Peet) and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). Boy, does Kate feel guilty about that. (And Alex does too, though in a minor, more manly way - he also feels guilty about enjoying the vulgarian Howard Stern.)
While Rebecca is patient with the bitter old bird, Mary is determined not to let Andra spoil her fun. The movie’s centerpiece is a dinner party Kate and Alex hold for Andra, Rebecca and Mary; a party that inevitably descends into socially awkward, inadvertent truthtelling.
In part because Holofcener is so insistent in portraying life as it appears to be rather than forcing it into dramedic conventions, the whole movie feels nervous and off-center, pleasantly acerbic in one moment, off-puttingly cruel in the next. It is well-observed but morally stunted, in that it suggests that charity is just another form of self-medication, and that simply caring - or pretending to care - is as good as actually trying to remedy social problems. It’s the liberal instinct, more than the selfless act, the movie seems to honor.
Holofcener obviously identifies with the conflicted creatures at the center of her movie, but does she really mean to let them off so easily as this movie seems to?
MovieStyle, Pages 36 on 06/18/2010