Manhattanites Unite

By Felicia Feaster

Whiny, self-absorbed urban yuppies? Yes, please! Especially if the director doing the ethnographic surveying is the shaggy-cool Nicole Holofcener (

Friends with Money

), who invests her characters with just the right balance of annoying quirks and squishy humanity to make them watchable—if not exactly lovable. Holofcener hasn’t strayed far from the

New York

streets and the slacker characters of her debut film, 1996’s

Walking and Talking

.

Catherine Keener, poster girl of needy post-slacker adulthood, stars in the black comedy

Please Give

as a Manhattan furniture dealer. Her job, essentially, is to wait for elderly New Yorkers to kick the bucket so she can cherry-pick their leavings, all the while playing cool in front of their heirs about the true value of the furniture.

Death becomes Kate (Keener) on many levels. Kate and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) also live next door to a cranky, elderly woman Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), whose imminent death will mean they can finally realize their

Manhattan real estate dreams of expanding their apartment. Though chubster Alex seems to feel little guilt about the vulture-like nature of their lives, Kate is eaten up by it. Like a campaigning politician, she routinely hands out cash to the homeless people in her neighborhood, and refuses on principle her teenage daughter Abby’s (Sarah Steele) request for an expensive pair of designer jeans. But because Kate’s agony is self-inflicted (and self-serving), her pathos comes across as comedic more than anything. Holofcener uses Kate’s “pain” as an evisceration of the absurd neuroses that drive upper-middle-class city folk with nothing more urgent about which to fret. Please Give is truly a film for our age, darkly comic stuff from a mistress of the miserable urbanites genre. It’s a fascinating keyhole into white, liberal guilt and how it can make people blind to the suffering and moments of grace going on right under their noses as they wring their hands over larger, grander sorrows.

Holofcener could be described as an indie, female version of Woody Allen for her relentless fixation on self-obsessed Manhattanites.  But where Allen can’t help himself from larding his screenplays with name drops as well as literary and film references to prop up his own smarts, Holofcener is a far-cooler customer, less interested in impressing you with her intelligence and more in plumbing the psychological depths of her oddball characters.

In line with its misanthropic characters, Please Give may have one of the most brutal opening credit scenes on record—a succession of smashed, kneaded, manipulated breasts fed through a mammogram imaging machine. It’s a telling, funny, confrontational Holofcener move that conveys both the fragility and brutality of the human condition. In a nutshell, life’s a bitch and then you die.

Please Give

Directed by Nicole Holofcener

With Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Sarah Steele and Amanda Peet

UA DeVargas

90 min.

R

Santa Fe Reporter