In “Please Give,” writer-director Nicole Holofcener would like you to believe she’s turned the whole concept of charity on its ear. The characters in the film all believe they’re helping society, contributing to their culture in significant ways. The conflict, of course, is that obviously none of these characters are allowing their surroundings to benefit from their presence, but for Holofcener, the problem becomes hiding this realization from the audience in order to drag out spotty melodrama. It’s not much of a trick, it turns out.
Catherine Keener plays a retail scavenger, searching for used furniture and apartments when tenants pass away or lose a pivotal loved one. She lives handsomely, believing there’s honor in freeing people of their hollow possessions, even while her husband (Oliver Platt) begins to openly note their vulture-hood. This complicates their relationship when they purchase the apartment of a local elderly woman, waiting for her to pass on while befriending her visiting daughter.
The daughter, played with an appealing mixture of intelligence and vulnerability by Rebecca Hall, has no such worries, as she’s merely trying to get through her job as a radiologist’s assistant, checking for breast cancer in between doting over granny. Her sister (Amanda Peet), however, is a steely career woman of petty jealousies and superficial preoccupations that mirror her heavily artificial tan. Naturally, it’s her that cajoles Keener’s husband into a highly implausible affair.
“Please Give,” with its acidic approach to deflating each character’s philosophy, might be Holofcener’s funniest film yet, but that’s probably because it’s also her meanest. The movie is filled with characters suffering cruel indignities, victims of pithy put-downs, short shrift, or bad luck. Of course there’s also the dramatic irony with some characters, particularly Keener’s wannabe philanthropist, who tries to get involved with community service while still playing by her own rules of engagement. The joke is she’s overly politically correct — a chance encounter with a black man waiting for a restaurant table is another chance for Keener to put her head up her ass, poorly denying her own intelligence as an actress by offering him her dinner scraps.
“Friends With Money,” Holofcener’s last film, seemed very much interested in the pressures of money, boiling down all interactions between the lead (Jennifer Aniston) and others into transactions. Here, there’s less of a class consciousness, as the film is set in the upper class bubble, the few destitute or financially screwed characters existing as one-dimension story goalposts. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a film about the upper class, unless you’re going to have such contempt for them. The cruelty visited upon Keener alone is deadening, reminding of the sullying Laura Linney didn’t deserve in “The Savages”. Not only is Keener paired with the unlikely gullet of Oliver Platt (who at one point takes off his shirt and reveals a gray shag carpet underneath), but she has to suffer in silence as Platt enters a purely physical union with the nails-on-a-chalkboard obnoxiousness of Peet’s petty tanning salon expert.
If the film has a heart, its in Sarah Steele, who plays the teenage daughter to Keener’s eager-beaver world-changer. Steele, infuriated with her mother’s “generosity,” finds herself developing the same petty gratification that comes with spending money, partly to strike back at her frugal mother, but also to combat the inexorable charge of puberty, damaging her face with an acne kamikaze attack. She’s at once learning about what it means to give and to take, but unfortunately, there are no parental figures to steer her straight, and your heart breaks when Steele gives in and visits the tanning salon looking for answers. Holofcener ends the picture on a curious note, leaving it ambiguous as to whether she’s finally giving the characters an undeserved break, or one final kick down the stairs. It will be telling that, once you leave the theater, you might be preoccupied with Steele’s character’s fate, but otherwise indifferent to the other characters suffering just one more indignity. [C]
