Friday, October 22, 2010

Please Give

After seeing Woody Allen's latest rehash of the genre, I wasn't sure if I was ready to tackle another Urban Indie talk piece but Nicole Holfcener's "Please Give" is a slight but honest and engaging look at modern city-dwelling women who try to reconcile their inner empaths with the coldness of city life.
Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt make a tidy living buying dead people's household furnishings and reselling them at a profit. Keener is riddled with guilt about, well, just about everything and the fact the she and Platt have purchased the apartment of the old lady next door and are waiting for her to keel over just makes her life unbearable. Keener compensates by giving money to homeless people and playing the sensitive soul to everyone except her own family. The old lady has to two granddaughters (played beautifully by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peete)and when these two families co-mingle they just seem to point up each others shortcomings like high contrast dye.
This is a short and gentle ride, more of a merry-go-round than a roller coaster. It all seems very honest, a journey punctuated by commas rather than exclamation points. The extraordinary ensemble makes the whole thing work. Nobody's life gets decimated and in the end you're kind of glad it all works out, just like real life usually does.

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