IN A WAY, Nicole Holofcener discovered Catherine Keener. After her 1996 indie film Walking and Talking, it was clear that Keener wouldn’t be used merely for a capacity for tragedy. Holofcener discerned the sardonic qualities behind what’s essentially a sad, drawn face. The partnership continues in the occasionally funny Please Give. Here, Keener has an against-type role as a bleeding heart in Manhattan. Kate (Keener) owns a boutique, making money reselling furniture she buys cheap at estate sales. She tangles with her adolescent daughter, Abby (Sara Steele), and suffers through her guilt at, essentially, making money from other people’s deaths. She also has a tenant, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), an exasperating old lady whose apartment Kate is planning to annex as soon as the crone dies. Holofcener hasn’t developed much as a visual filmmaker in the past 15 years—she still favors the walking and talking shot. Visual humor is a little beyond her, though she tries: in a gag of a lover’s face in midsex panting next to a statue of Buddha or in the vintage slapstick of a man dropping a valuable vase. She leaves you with the words, and the words are runners-up in The New Yorker cartoon-caption contest: one line, for instance, about a spuriously valuable piece being from “the antique era.” Please Give spirals out to include Andra’s toxically grandparented offspring: one named Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a dog-walking pal to the angry Abby; and Rebecca’s sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), who supplies a romantic interest to Kate’s distracted husband. The doughy husband (Oliver Platt) is drawn by Mary’s refreshing curtness. So are we. Since there isn’t a traditional Catherine Keener character in this comedy, we’re more taken with her surrogate, in the form of Peet’s ruthless energy. In a movie, as in a sporting competition, we’re drawn to the player who wants it more.—Richard von Busack
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
Please Give
R; 90 min.
Directed by Nicole Holofcener and starring Catherine Keener
Opens May 7 @ Los Gatos Cinema
