Please Give

By Josh Bell

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 | 6:38 p.m.

The Details

Please Give

Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet

Directed by Nicole Holofcener

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Please Give

IMDb: Please Give

Rotten Tomatoes: Please Give

"Things get worse, not better,” says bitchy facialist Mary (Peet) to her nonagenarian grandmother in Nicole Holofcener’s caustic character study Please Give, and that could be taken as the film’s thesis; either that or “Nothing helps,” said in desperation by guilt-ridden antique-furniture dealer Kate (Keener) to her much less conscience-burdened husband Alex (Platt). Like Noah Baumbach, Holofcener has become increasingly pointed in her dissections of upper-middle-class passive-aggression over the course of her four-film career, although unlike Baumbach she still allows a tiny bit of room for warmth and optimism.

It’s that sliver of hope, along with some wonderful performances, that makes Please Give such an emotionally rich film, one that can show us a bunch of people who are hypocritical, petty and sometimes downright mean, yet at heart are only struggling to get through life the best they can. Holofcener, like Baumbach or their shared spiritual godfather Woody Allen, could be criticized for overly glamorizing the trivial problems of rich white urbanites, but Please Give takes the feelings of guilt over being better-off than others and turns them into its subject matter, as its main characters grapple with how to live meaningful lives when they essentially want for nothing.

Kate and Alex build their business by buying valuable vintage furniture from the unsuspecting children of dead people, and they are lying in wait for their elderly neighbor, grandmother to Mary and Rebecca (Hall), to die so they can use her apartment to expand their living space. Kate futilely hands out cash to homeless people and Googles volunteer opportunities to assuage her vague guilt, all while denying her teenage daughter the pleasures of an overpriced pair of jeans. While Rebecca seems like the one genuinely nice character in the movie, she too is using her generosity as a way to compensate for other insecurities.

Each actor finds the core vulnerability just below the neuroticism and self-obsession; Please Give isn’t about judging or celebrating these people, merely understanding them. Maybe things get worse, but movies like this at least make it easier to handle.