Please Give [20 points / 2 votes]
"No stranger to biting, intelligently observed roundelays of character and cross-wired purposes, writer-director Nicole Holofcener delivered an honest and precious gem this year, a superb, apparently endlessly resonant comedy about good intentions, selfish intentions and the derailed results that come from each. Please Give is set amongst a group of characters who alternate between sweet empathy and sour lack of regard for the people populating their peripheral vision, all of whom revolve around each other in a Manhattan so keenly, vividly realized as to seem almost alien (unless, if enthusiastic testimony can be believed, you live there).
Holofcener muse Catherine Keener is a vintage furniture dealer whose business, which she operates with husband Oliver Platt, is built on scavenging the estates of the newly deceased and who patiently waits for her elderly and from all encounters ghastly neighbor (Ann Guilbert, radiating caustic genius) to kick the bucket so they can expand their apartment into hers. Rebecca Hall plays a radiologist’s assistant, obviously beautiful but insecure, particularly in regards to her own relatively gangly body. She’s the granddaughter of the elderly neighbor and strikes up an unlikely camaraderie with Keener’s insecure teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) because she can’t relate to the sneering, casual cruelty of her own sister (Amanda Peet). Desperate for a connection to this pimply, sarcastic teenager who finds her slightly ridiculous, Keener plies compliant (or at least subdued) behavior from the girl by praising her personality but inadvertently shoring up her insecurities as well while her husband, despite his obvious love for and connection with his wife, decides to follow his impulsive attraction to Peet wherever it leads.
It is for good reason that Please Give recently won the Best Ensemble award at the Independent Spirit Awards, an award named for director Robert Altman. Altman’s great ensemble films like California Split and Nashville were exuberant tapestries of life lived around the edges and deep along the Z-axis of any given frame, films that weren’t concerned as much about audience sympathies as reflecting the infinite degrees of humanity that could be found in a tiny aside, a grand, farcical, doomed gesture and all the emotional ground in between. In the same way, Please Give invites audiences to consider recognizable human behavior and understand its origins, its motivations, inviting conclusions or reactions and then throwing into blessed relief any number of reasons why those conclusions and reactions might be premature. What’s more, the movie is populated by characters that are rich and contradictory enough to invite comparison to the best of Altman as well.
The movie, which traverses the ambiguous field of meaning that subtly informs Keener’s desire to contribute something to her fellow man, makes plenty of room for challenging and examining the motivations of its characters. Is Keener’s sense of social responsibility sincere, or is it borne of guilt or, in the case of her relationship with her daughter, a need for surface placidity to replace the encroaching upheaval within her own apartment’s walls? Holofcener offers up behavioral patterns in parenting and general social relations that are often uncomfortable, sometimes enraging, almost always curdled from the point of conception, but in context completely believable, and with a stunning lack of judgment. Holofcener’s surprisingly even-tempered and dare I say grown-up approach to Platt’s infidelity, for example, is handled with such grace and lack of moral bile that it proves a corrective to the on-the-nose grandstanding over a similar situation in the more widely seen and praised The Kids Are All Right.
Please Give refuses to snap into relief and instruct you what to think when the last shot gives way to the end credits, when the debate over the motivations and behavior of these wittily, realistically realized characters can truly begin. Nicole Holofcener means to send you out of the theater ready to call her characters on the carpet, especially when it seems they’ve finally figured things out, but at the same time she does not preclude the possibility that what looks like indulgence to one pair of eyes may be a redemptive solution to another. A film that lives as rich and vivid life in the memory as it does when it engages you in real time with its sublime images, probing screenplay and the multitude of gifts, incidental and central, which its wonderful cast offers to the viewer one after the other, Please Give is an unassuming masterpiece, my choice for the best movie of 2010." - Dennis Cozzalio
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