Nicole Holofcener has made only four movies in the course of her approximate 15-year directing career, but that could be because each movie is really two in one: There's the picture right in front of you, the one you actually watch, which can often feel like a clutch of orphan vignettes wandering around in search of some organizing principle. And then there's the way that shambling mosaic reforms itself in your mind minutes, hours or days afterward.
You think you've buttoned up the characters' lives and laid them to rest, only to find yourself making unbidden, random observations about them as you're fixing a sandwich or flossing your teeth: Why did that character talk to her mother that way, and why did her mother let her? That girl was so lovely -- why were her social skills so lame? Two hundred dollars for a pair of jeans? That's nuts! Holofcener writes, and helps to shape on-screen, characters we often don't even like, and what do we do? We invite them home with us. Talk about a soft touch.
Holofcener's latest, Please Give, may have the softest touch of all her movies: It's perhaps less polished, and less biting, than her 2006 effort Friends with Money, but it's ultimately earthier and far more moving. That picture -- like Holofcener's superb, immensely tender 2002 Lovely and Amazing -- was set in Los Angeles. Please Give, on the other hand, is not just set in New York; it's pure New York, so frighteningly, maddeningly endearingly New York that I hope it doesn't completely scare off people who don't live here. (I don't believe it will.)
Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt play Kate and Alex, longtime residents of a Manhattan apartment building (it appears to be one of the stately older buildings along lower Fifth Avenue) who run a furniture store specializing in mid-century modern, a style of furniture so cool that it doesn't even need a noun for a name, just a compound adjective. They buy the stuff, cheap, from families who want to unload the goods of their recently deceased relatives, fast. Then they put it in their store at a markup of 200 or 300 percent, give or take.
If you're anything like me, you're probably going to want to hate Kate and Alex; if you're anything like me, you probably won't be able to. The apartment Kate and Alex live in is nice enough, though not luxurious. They share it with their pouty teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), who's going through a pudgy, awkward stage. The plot of Please Give, inasmuch as it has one, details the way these characters' lives intertwine -- possibly only temporarily -- with those of two almost-neighbors, the granddaughters of the sour old woman (Ann Morgan Guilbert) who lives next door. The older granddaughter, Mary (Amanda Peet), is a perpetually tan, perpetually shallow skin-care technician, the kind of person who can call herself a "skin-care technician" with a straight face. Her sister, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), is another sort of technician altogether: She works in radiology, administering mammograms all day, every day. Rebecca is far more patient, and far kinder, than her older sister is. But she's also much more socially awkward, to the point where she makes you worry about how she'll get along in the world. When Kate runs into Rebecca in the building's elevator and makes the idle, passively friendly remark, "It's hot outside today," Rebecca glances at her, with a blank, unreadable expression that's clearly shyness, and responds matter-of-factly, "I work inside."
That's one hell of a conversation-stopper, yet it's typical of the way Holofcener develops scenes between characters. The people in her movies communicate in a kind of semaphore, where much of what they really mean to say is jammed into the awkward spaces between words. Holofcener's film-building approach -- her movies sometimes feel more "layered" than "made" -- is the equivalent of dashing around with a small mirror, holding it up to the weird little things people say and do everyday. We learn things about her characters just by watching them: Kate, as a reasonably affluent New Yorker, knows she ought to be giving something back, and so she makes several failed efforts at volunteer work. She bursts into tears, for example, as she watches a group of perfectly cheerful retarded adults playing basketball; she can't seem to make the distinction between pity and compassion. And at one point she tries to give a totally groovy-looking older black guy her restaurant leftovers, believing he's homeless. Guilty, as so many of us often are, of looking without seeing, she's simply failed to register the laid-back chic of his jauntily tied neckscarf and old-school layered sweaters.
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.