Please Give | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Catherine Keener as Kate and Oliver Platt as Alex in Nicole Holofcener's Please Give. [Photo: Sony Pictures Classics]

Please Give *

by Andrew Schenker on April 26, 2010 Jump to Comments (3) or Add Your Own

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It's fitting that a copy of New York Magazine figures prominently in a key scene in Please Give, since Nicole Holofcener's film seems geared to the same superficial, property-obsessed, upper-middle-class sensibility that the magazine peddles on a weekly basis. With one key exception, each of the film's principal characters is either a dyed-in-the-wool materialist or an aspiring one, and while their guilt at this materialism becomes the movie's principal theme, Holofcener ladles out just enough easily quenchable remorse to allow the characters to continue comfortably in their acquisitive lifestyles, all the while asking the viewer to join in the smug sensibility that undergirds most of the film's humor. After all, what good is privilege if it can't laugh at itself?

Comfortable Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) make a living pillaging the apartments of the dead for valuable antiques. Visiting the kin of the newly deceased, they buy up their "junk" for a song and then sell it for thousands of dollars in their shop. Meanwhile, they await the ultimate acquisition, the apartment next door to their own residence, which requires only the death of its 91-year-old resident to complete their purchase of that property and allow them to merge the two units into a single dream apartment. While Alex seems untroubled by the ethics of both the business and the death watch, guilt begins to overwhelm Kate, a woman so torn up by culpability that she begins to adopt ludicrous measures of expiation, such as giving homeless people on the streets $20 bills or volunteering for public service opportunities for which she's wholly unsuited, all the while ignoring her own daughter's material needs.

Ah, the guilt of the privileged; would that we all had such problems. No such dilemma exists, however, for the film's other main character, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), the reticent, good-hearted granddaughter of the 91-year-old next-door neighbor. Initially providing a welcome antidote to the rest of the film's half-celebrated superficiality, as well as some of the movie's less obnoxiously humorous dialogue (a mammogram technician, she tells a romantic partner that she views breasts as "tubes of potential danger"), Rebecca's charm and intelligence are undercut by her being too often paired with inferior partners. In the early going we're forced to suffer through yet another screen portrayal of a grumpy, absurdly frugal grandmother, while in the film's later stages a dorky, dim-witted boyfriend suddenly brings her a measure of happiness but reduces what had been the film's only promising character into a relative cipher.

For the rest, it's the usual assortment of unlikely affairs, uncomfortable dinner parties and observations about upper-middle-class behavior that have something of the ring of truth about them, but then end up feeling contrived through insistent repetition, as when characters continually refer to hundreds of dollars by omitting the zeroes, as if they're so used to speaking in hundreds that they can just say "six." Typical of Holofcener's approach is a strategy of relative materialism by which characters more superficial than the main bunch are trotted out for us to laugh at, thus diverting attention from the fact that Kate and Alex are only one step removed from a similar orientation. When a customer at their shop unctuously declares that a wall hanging would look great at his house in New Paltz, Alex mouths "asshole" under his breath, forgetting that he's just as obsessed with his own real-estate project. Similarly, Rebecca's ultra-tan sister, a beauty technician, is derided for her skin-deep concerns (it's right there in her job description!), but Kate and Alex's own daughter, a cynical, acne-ridden teen who in another movie would stand as the smart nerd, is here obsessed with nothing more than designer jeans and facials.

Of course, there's a measure of critique built into Holofcener's presentation of all this chasing after superficial happiness, but it's surprisingly disingenuous and ultimately celebratory of the things it claims to criticize. After all, what's wrong with indulging in ridiculous privilege so long as you acknowledge that that's what you're doing, right? It's a tribute to Catherine Keener's lightly worn credibility that her inevitable all-out moral crisis feels halfway believable, at least until she returns a valuable vase to its original owner. But whatever gestures Keener—and the film—makes toward undermining her essential materialism go only so far. Please Give is a movie that positions the viewer in a certain privileged viewpoint, then critiques that viewpoint to a degree limited enough not to challenge any of its essential assumptions. And the proof of this is that not only do Kate and Alex move forward with their proposed apartment acquisition, but Holofcener ends the film with that ultimate gesture of maternal love: the purchase of a $230 pair of designer jeans for an ecstatic daughter from the trendiest of downtown boutiques.

Director(s): Nicole Holofcener
Screenplay: Nicole Holofcener
Cast: Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Ann Guilbert, Lois Smith, Sarah Steele, Thomas Ian Nicholas
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Runtime: 90 min.
Rating: R
Year: 2010

Comments

BDeGuire on April 28, 2010, 04:07 AM

Perhaps you would have preferred more of a scorched earth, Weekend-style takedown of these characters and their lifestyle? By the tone of the review, it seems like your understandable antipathy towards consumerism and privilege has warped your perception of what Holofcener actually put on the screen. Granted, she doesn't condemn her characters for their materialism, but she doesn't celebrate them for it either, unless you contend that the mere act of representing an affluent lifestyle on film necessarily undermines any effort to critique it, because the seductive visuals have more power than any narrative message. But come on, if you want to see real consumerist porn, check out a Nancy Meyers flick. (Or better yet, don't).

For example, the scene in which Alex calls the customer an asshole stems from their funny argument over whether the wall hanging is really a rug. At least from my point of view, the customer is right, making Alex the butt of the joke. Also the scene has another level of subtext, because the customer's girlfriend (I'm assuming they're dating) was played by Sarah Vowell, and earlier in the movie we'd seen Kate holding a copy of Vowell's book Assassination Vacation while chastising Alex for not being someone who reads. To me, that couple in the store represents a level of status, not just material, but also cultural, that Alex and Kate will never attain. They made Alex and Kate seem rather phony by comparison, while also underscoring the ultimate futility of letting money or status define you; because in the end they will never be enough, someone else will always walk through the door with more.

And in terms of the ending, yes, the daughter gets her designer jeans. But she also gets the knowledge that her dad cheated on her mom. Hell, she might even have the facial scars to remind her of it every time she looks in the mirror. I got the sense that her material ecstasy will be short lived.

Andrew Schenker on April 30, 2010, 09:39 AM

"[Holofcener] doesn't condemn her characters for their materialism, but she doesn't celebrate them for it either."

Maybe she doesn't celebrate them, but she certainly excuses them for their shallowness and perpetual desire for more; it's as if as long as they feel guilty about it, then by all means go ahead and be as acquisitive as you like. While the scene where Alex calls the customer an asshole shows an obvious contrast in cultural and financial status between the customer and the central couple, I don't think it shows Alex and Kate as being phonies for not being able to attain that status. The question of whether the object is a rug or a wall hanging (a ridiculous bit of speculation which satirizes the customer's pretensions more than the couple's) is secondary to my mind to the snobbishness signified by the customer, especially when he casually mentions his house in New Paltz. When Alex calls him an asshole, I think we're supposed to agree with his assessment, saying that while Alex and Kate pursue their financial goals through questionable means, at least they're not as obnoxious as that guy. (Nor do I think they explicitly aspire to his level of cultural and financial status.) So it's okay for them to pursue their practices as long as they feel some guilt about it.

As for the ending, it's as if the one act of returning the valuable vase to the man has finally expiated Kate's guilt and now she doesn't feel like she has to give money to homeless people, she's free to spend it on expensive jeans for her daughter. And while, the "material ecstasy" of the jeans may be likely to be short lived for the daughter, she's never evinced any interest in anything else besides facials and clothing (I know, a comment on the difficulty of being a less than attractive young girl), so it's hard to say what else she might take pleasure in besides jeans. She's essentially a perfect consumerist in training. Again, the only character that serves as an antidote to this selfish materialism (Rebecca) is effectively eliminated as a character halfway through the film when she gets a boyfriend who, despite the fact he thinks it's funny to make a joke about a mammogram technician being a dream job for a man (because he gets to see all those breasts) is deemed an interesting partner for that character. Now that she's out of the way, we're free to deal with Kate (and to a small degree) Alex's guilt over her status, which even if she'll never attain elite cultural/financial status is of a highly elevated level (especially in 21st century Manhattan) and Holofcener's treatment of that crisis, is to allow her to have it both ways: she can be freed of her guilt and have material gain as well—the perfect confirmation of an upper middle class lifestyle.

troubadour on January 8, 2011, 11:38 AM