During her career, Holofcener has made “Walking and Talking,” Lovely and Amazing” and “Friends with Money.” Her latest film opens with a graphic montage depicting the tragedy of mammograms. Not really a tragedy, that’s overstatement, but it takes a delicate beautiful thing and makes it, uh… makes you want to close your eyes at the indignity. These opening seconds are the least appealing element of the film. But maybe it was meant solely for the female audience to identify with (and not me). It used to be men that gave women a hard time in Holofcener movies, now you can add the doctor’s office.
Then there is the human consciousness. Kate (Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) are in the business of buying the vintage antiques of the recently deceased, sometimes buying apartments of the deceased. Kate and Alex live in a high-rise unit, next to a unit inhabited by the elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert). She is cared for by her granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), who share a range of good and bad opinion of Kate and Alex, whom in essence, are bargain-hunters.
The fizz in Kate and Alex’s marriage is deflating their sense of worth. Perhaps the problem is that they share every waking minute together (can marriage and occupation co-exist?). They have an overweight and generally insecure teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), whose self-esteem would boost if only somebody bought her a two-hundred dollar pair of jeans. But Kate doesn’t buy her jeans, or buy her skin care. Not when there are starving homeless people on the street. Alex could also step in and buy for his daughter, but he invests elsewhere too, in the lives of strangers.
This story is as much a marriage deconstruction as it is a portrait of the two granddaughters next door. Rebecca is an attractive and hard-working radiology technician who barely gets out to date (she prefers guys that are the cute type, like Thomas Ian Nicholas who plays Eugene), while Mary doesn’t date she does get around in various meaningless flings. But the story set-up is that Rebecca and Mary are neighbors to a married couple they don’t like because they look like they want to leech on their grandmother as soon as she passes.
Then the surprise is that Rebecca and Mary make friends with them, only it is made in a singularly paved way. Rebecca becomes closer to Kate, while Mary becomes closer to Alex and their daughter Abby. Defined by different avenues, each friendship becomes its own privatized confessional. Kate leaks out her guilt to Rebecca for what she does for a living. Alex pours out his frustrations on lack of excitement in his marriage to Mary. And Mary becomes Abby’s skin care specialist, and lousy advisor on beauty since to her beauty is skin deep and nothing else. Rebecca carries all the guilt between the two sisters. Seething is this unspoken rivalry between sensitivity and shallowness.
But all of this description fails to convey what a talented writer Holofcener is who cares too much about her characters to give them false objectives. Shall I reaffirm to you that the film ends in the humbling, realistic way it should end without being hammered with overblown dramatic ploys? What’s criterion is that Holofcener writes jokes worthy of Woody Allen in the 1970’s, but with a pro-feminist spark interpolated into it. She writes characters that are real and rounded, vulnerable and neurotic, smart and courageous – at least courageous for contemporary New Yorker types. And she finds varied and individual details in her characters. Holofcener puts the brains back in chick flicks and reinstalls the idea that at least a few chick flicks out there are made for the grown-up thinking person.
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Grade: B+
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