REVIEW: Strong Performances, Superb Direction Lift Please Give

But if Kate is failing in the giving department, she's so clearly working toward something that you can't help feeling for her. (In one of the picture's loveliest moments she secretly watches Abby shopping for makeup in the drugstore -- it's one of those turning points where the protectiveness of motherhood morphs into a sympathetic memory of what it was like to be an adolescent trying to gain entry into the adult world.) Other characters give themselves away in big and small ways: Platt's Alex drifts into a kind of behavior that could be deeply hurtful to the people he loves most, and while it's impossible to like him for it, it's just as impossible to judge him. Peet's Mary nonchalantly applies a coat of lipgloss at the dinner table, and afterward, hands it across to Steele's Abby, so she can put some on, too. Is that generosity or bad manners? It's hard to say, yet the gesture says more about Mary than a dozen lines of dialogue could.

Of all these characters, Hall's Rebecca is the warmest, the most worrisome, and the most deeply touching. She's the only person here who cares for her 90-something grandmother, a crankcase who is, admittedly, difficult to care for -- the kind of person you might try to make feeble excuses for until you reconcile yourself to the fact that she's simply a miserable human being. (She greets Kate and Alex at the door in her housecoat, scowling as she bellows at Alex, "You put on weight!" On the other hand, Kate and Alex are transparently waiting for her to die so they can annex her apartment -- the noncordial cordiality of their exchanges suggests a ruthless practicality on both sides.)

Rebecca may be as honest as her grandmother is (a good trait), but she isn't nearly as cutting. She's also terrifically lonely: While visiting her grandmother, sorting methodically through the woman's thousand-and-one pills, she momentarily gazes out the window at young people horsing around in the park outside. Hall doesn't so much show wistfulness on her face as carry it on her shoulders, like a furry collar that's sometimes too heavy or too hot. She tries, unsuccessfully, to date: A guy she meets through an online dating site, after discovering she was born and raised in New York, blurts out that he thinks it's a terrible place to raise kids. And later, when she actually meets a guy she likes, the two walk side-by-side down the city sidewalk -- they might bump shoulders, in that affectionate, clumsy way that people who like each other often do, except for the fact that she's nearly a head taller than he is. No matter. Hall's walk, her feet splayed out like those of a ballerina duck, has its own cartoonish elegance, the kind of freedom of movement that points the way to happiness ahead.

Not that we actually see her reach that happiness. Holofcener's movies can be maddening for the way they lead, like a trail of promising bread crumbs, to nowhere. But the delicate nonstructure of her films suggests that even nowhere can be a destination, and once we arrive, we realize we have more answers to our questions than we thought we did: How can we know people without really knowing them? What it's like to live in a place that we've perhaps seen only in the movies? Holofcener doesn't hand us those answers, but she shows the way to them, gradually leading us to a place where one character makes an inconse
quential, climactic decision.

The last moments of Please Give are frustrating, baffling or sweetly generous depending, probably, on your own mood, temperament or philosophy on child rearing. I suspect nearly everyone who sees the picture will have a loud opinion about this ending, which is just one way Holofcener works her stealth magic as a filmmaker and storyteller: She doesn't close up shop on her movie until she's made each of us an honorary New Yorker -- in other words, a person with a strong stance and something to say.

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