« In Which You Get What You Give In Nicole Holofcener's Please Give »
Money Can't Buy You Class
by DAVID HILL
Please Give
dir. Nicole Holofcener
90 minutes
Please Give opens with a startling sequence, a parade of breasts being placed into a mammogram scanner. However this may be the most dignified sequence in the film. Nicole Holofcener’s latest film deals quite a bit with death and dignity in ways that are both subtle and ways that whack you right over the head. While the opening scene is one of those head-whackers, the final one is more of a head scratcher, with far less dignity for those involved.
It’s a little cliché at this point to compare Nicole Holofcener to Woody Allen, but when she says things to the Village Voice like “death is the new yoga,” it’s unavoidable. Sure her films explore the vapid morality of the Manhattan bourgeoisie, and sure she was raised by Charles Joffe, Allen’s longtime producer, but it's this interest in death and the existential terror of growing old that for me puts her in Woody’s company.
The characters in Please Give are all surrounded by death. The main protagonists, Alex (Oliver Platt), Kate (Catherine Keener) and their daughter Abby, are waiting for their elderly neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) to die so they can expand into her apartment, which they have already purchased. Andra, meanwhile, is cared for by her two daughters, Mary (Amanda Peet) and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), who she raised after their mother committed suicide a decade before. The two families are surrounded by death in more subtle ways as well. Rebecca administers the aforementioned mammograms for a living while Kate and Alex purchase furniture from the grieving relatives of the recently deceased to sell in their hip overpriced vintage furniture shop.
Kate, the film’s main protagonist, has much in the way of demons to excise. She feels guilt over how much she has, guilt about how she got it, and obsesses over how she can get right with the less fortunate. This obsession often leads her imagination down the darkest of imaginary alleys. When she sees a disheveled black man outside of a restaurant she tries to give him her leftovers, only to find that he is waiting for a table. She imagines the wife of her building’s super to be wheelchair bound for no apparent reason other than it seems to serve her Dickensian image of their poor family.
Kate’s husband Alex has less of a problem with his own station in life. He chooses to obsess over his own age and virility. He steps out on Kate with a much younger woman for no other reason than to see if he can. Up to the point of the affair we are lead to believe that their relationship and family life seems fine, and it is. While in bed with his mistress she points out that people often say that when someone cheats it is because something is wrong with their relationship. He rejects this and says "some people say that it can help, that it can make it better." With this line he reveals the level to which he has been using this younger woman and just how self-involved the whole affair really was.
Alex had no problems at home, he just needed to feel young. Together with a young man who thinks that administering mammograms must be an awesome job “from a guy’s point of view,” these are the only male characters in the film. But if Holofcener is truly meant to inherit Woody Allen’s mantle, perhaps by making Alex a Howard Stern fan she is righting the wrongs of many of Allen’s portrayals of women.
The poor child of these two obsessives is Abby. She has serious body-image issues and pretty bad skin. But she is convinced that a pair of $200 jeans can make things better. Kate can’t possibly understand where her daughter learned such superficiality when there are people starving in the streets! Their relationship is strained and volatile. Kate sees in Abby a shallow and entitled child despite her efforts to raise someone less materialistic and needy. When Abby chastises Kate for trying to give $20 to a homeless man and says “you never give me $20! Give him the $5!” Kate hands over the five and says to the man “I’m so ashamed.” Clearly she’s ashamed for all the wrong reasons.
Throughout Please Give we see Kate use charity to alleviate her class guilt with calamitous results. She can never understand why on one hand her charity doesn’t seem to make her feel any better nor help the people she bestows it on. When she decides to give back a valuable vase to a man whose parents' furniture made Kate a lot of money, he seems untouched by the gesture (as she leaves he accidentally breaks her valuable yet mostly symbolic vase by dropping it on the floor). However since Kate is so overly concerned with her own do-goodery she is unable to see the ways in which her own charity is robbing the recipients of their own dignity.
My favorite scene in Please Give follows the birthday party scene in which Kate and Alex give their neighbor Andra a box of beauty products as a gift. The party is filled with uncomfortable, awkward, honest moments that come mostly at Andra’s expense. Once the guests all leave we see Andra shuffle out her apartment and down the hall where she tosses the box of creams and conditioners down the rubbish shaft. A dignified moment for one of the film’s most complex comic characters.
Like Woody Allen’s protagonists, Kate and Alex are not perfect people. They aren’t perfectly awful, either. There is something very human and normal about their shallowness, and there are moments where each of them transcend this trope as well. For Alex, a sweet scene with his daughter where she confronts him about his affair. For Kate it’s a very touching and sincere couple of scenes with Rebecca, the radiologist daughter of their elderly neighbor. Rebecca is the woman Kate wishes to be. She lives as selflessly as one can realistically imagine to. However she, too, is incredibly unhappy. Kate seems to recognize this sadness in Rebecca.
As the film closes with Alex and Kate buying Abby her jeans (which at first seemed ridiculously expensive until we see what these people pay for used furniture) I’m not sure what thought we are supposed to be left with. On one hand Kate and Alex may be coming to the conclusion that perhaps their daughter’s happiness is not only in the balance, but also a just reward for a different form of charity. On the other hand, the viewer is left with a picture of a girl who, while obviously very happy and confident in her jeans, is doomed to a life of superficiality and narcissism, just like her parents.
For her it's these jeans, for her dad it’s a sexy young dermatologist, for her mom it’s a larger apartment. They are the things we think will make us happier, but just give us more to feel shitty about. And from that there is no escape. Says Holofcener, "It's more of an existential than a circumstantial sadness about our helplessness and the inevitability of death and the pointlessness of everything.” It’s a Sisyphean dilemma. Watching them pass on these problems to their daughter is heart-wrenching.
Woody Allen recently said: "Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful." Please Give is about just such distortions. It isn't a bad movie. Its a good movie about bad people whose distortions make them seem worse than the rest of us. In truth however, todos somos yuppie furniture dealers. Give or take a few manipulations.
David Hill is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is his first appearance in these pages. He twitters here.
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Reader Comments (2)
granddaughters, you mean!
I love the "todos somos illegales" reference, although I found Abby to be bratty, I didn't really blame her for wanting the $200 jeans. I mean can you imagine how hard it must be for a chubby teen to find jeans? Can you put a price tag on easing the pain of an awkward child. Also how much do people think those facials with Mary cost? Somehow she is able to just waltz in and get those without an appointment.
Also how about those Sarah Vowell cameos.