Burdened by Good Fortune

Nicole Holofcener’s darkly funny film, “Please Give,� tackles a matter most of us face, or should face: how to act, and feel, when confronted with the reality that we are luckier, or more privileged, than our neighbor.

   Kate (Catherine Keener) responds at first through compulsive charity, gradually escalating her attempts until she nearly falls apart.

   She and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) run a successful vintage furniture shop in Manhattan. They buy the contents of dead people’s apartments from children too busy to care whether Mom’s couch is junk or a mid-century modern classic. They’ve also bought their elderly next-door neighbor’s apartment, and will break through the walls to renovate — after she dies.  

   The neighbor, Andra, is cared for by two granddaughters, who respond to the hovering couple with understandable hostility. Andra doles out her share of nastiness, too. She is cranky, mean and ungrateful.  Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is the more dutiful of the two daughters — a mammography technician, she shops, does laundry and looks longingly out the window at other young people having fun. Mary (Amanda Peet), bitchy and beautiful, avoids grandma. She’s too busy stalking her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.

   In Holofcener’s world, everyone says the rude and misanthropic things that in real life people usually keep to themselves. In the hands of a less accomplished director or less appealing actors, the film could be nearly unwatchable, but Keener, in particular, lends her warmth and humanity to a deeply anxious character. Kate  feels so guilty about her own comfortable position that she hands out money to homeless men on the street (and some who aren’t) but won’t buy her teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), the jeans she wants.  In one excruciating  scene, Abby grabs back a $20 from a homeless man and refuses to give it up. Kate apologizes to the man for Abby’s behavior, saying “I’m so ashamed.â€�  

   In only 90 quick minutes, Holofcener manages, with brilliant wit, to explore the minute textures of a marriage that is beginning to fray, the endless complexities of mother- and teenage-daughter relationships, the bond between sisters and the challenge of trying to be a good person in the face of wanting things you just can’t, or shouldn’t, have.

   Holofcener has written more superb parts for women of all ages in one film than I’ve seen in movies the last 12 months, combined.  And, as director, she’s brought out the best in her actresses. Peet, usually all brittle surface, reveals the fear underneath Mary’s confident exterior. Steele shows  the pudgy and pimpled Abby’s intelligence and her love for her parents even when she’s furious at them. And Keener is perfect, feeling her way through life, trying to find ways to be a good person that sometimes backfire and sometimes actually have their intended effect after all, she is funny, smart and very insightful - just like this film.

Rated R for language, sexual content and nudity. It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY.

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