In Which We Stop Counting The Masseuse's Lies

The Light of My Something

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Enough Said
dir. Nicole Holofcener
93 minutes

Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is the only masseuse in the world who has never had a pedicure. She is a snob. Her daughter is a snob; same goes for her daughter's friend. Her boyfriend is a snob, her best friend is a snob. Her ex-husband is a snob. His wife is a snob. Her friend's maid is a snob, her clients are all all snobs, especially Marianne (Catherine Keener), who is probably the queen of all snobs. Nicole Holofcener has reduced the behavior of all white people to its basic component — wanting to be better at something than someone, anyone.

In her cathartic and disturbing masterpiece Friends with Money, Holofcener made a maid the centrifuge of her Los Angeles satire. That this maid looked to be, from all evidence, Jennifer Aniston, hampered her point a bit. Louis-Dreyfus is a lot more believable in the role. "I guess I'll have to find a hobby," she says, because her daughter is headed to Sarah Lawrence in the fall. There is no way of knowing whether she means it, because she lies so often.

Amazingly, Eva condescends to date an overweight man named Albert (James Gandolfini). Gandolfini resembles a balloon about to pop. Whatever charm he might have retained from his signature role has dissipated, and if you rolled him down a hill and off a ramp at a high speed, he would soar into the sky. He works for a television museum, but informs Eva that he loathes contemporary television.

Later Albert explains that he only likes Jack Benny, whom I presume was a slaveowner. My knowledge of the television of the 1930s (1830s?) is limited at best.

Eva finds out that Albert's ex-wife is her client/friend Catherine Keener. Ensconced in fabric so enveloping it resembles a muumuu, she explains that her ex-husband does not have any friends, although, "Neither do I." Keener then goes on to relate all the ways she found her ex-husband inadequate: she wasn't interested in him sexually, he never seriously tried to lose weight, he didn't have any bedside tables.

Chief among her complaints is the way he swirls his guacamole. Watching the nearly comatose Gandolfini try to sit on a couch (he more perches, like an orangutan) and reenact the source of his ex-wife's complaint is a last meal of sorts. It is certainly no fun.

There are precious few laughs in Enough Said, not because Holofcener's script isn't cynical enough. It is so cynical it makes Gulliver's Travels look like a ringing endorsement of its time.

Toni Collette plays the one semi-likable character, a therapist named Sarah who detests her patients so much she makes fun of them eating their own mucus at dinner parties. The only thing sympathetic about her is that she has a terrible, unhappy maid.

Eva's daughter seems mostly inclined to ignore her mother in the months before her departure. As a surrogate relationship, she mothers over Chloe (Tavi Gevinson), who comes to her with such difficult questions as, "Should I fuck my boyfriend?" (She should and does.)

Tavi's cinematic debut is not a total disaster — at times she projects an earthy somnolence, other moments scream her inexperience. Still, outside of Please Give's Abby, young people are usually just an appendage in Holofcener's films, mini-mes destined to suffer the same travails as the parents they so closely resemble.

Holofcener is coming to her point throughout, however. At first, only a few people felt sorry for themselves. The rest were just glad to be alive. Things could have been worse; they could be in Saigon/Vietnam/Korea/Iraq. Feeling sorry for yourself has become such an attenuated art form that it represents a moral given. A matter of degrees separates us only, of how sorry for yourself you feel, and what you deserve in spite of all the lies you told, or because of the truths you inherited.

It was difficult to watch Gandolfini's acting ability decline with his health. (Even Marlon Brando would have turned aside the dinner that finished him off.) It is even harder to spend one second feeling sorry for him, and it is unlikely he ever managed to feel sorry for himself.

Although his personage here is loathsome (he accidentally shows Eva his penis during brunch and begs her to compliment it), at least, in stacks of digitized video of the past, he has found something to enjoy. All around him, these people do not even have that.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Can't Wait" - Arcade Fire (mp3)