ViewGuide

Created May 19, 2010 11:04PM PST • Edited Oct 25, 2013 05:14PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Everybody’s damaged in Please Give. Most are awful, some sweet, all adrift. Misanthropic, it generates frequent laughs at the expense of these modern Manhattanites. Think a more seriously inclined Seinfeld – from the feminine side. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

   The movie revolves around a successful Fifth Avenue estate furniture boutique run by a husband and his bleeding-heart wife (Oliver Platt and Katherine Keener), and frequently visited by their acne beset teen daughter (Sarah Steele). Always on the make for hot buys from the recently deceased, they’ve seized an opportunity to expand their personal space by acquiring an apartment adjacent to theirs. The elderly shrew (Ann Guilbert) still living in the coveted apartment and her granddaughters round out the main players. Oh those daughter’s daughters: the frumpy good one (Rebecca Hall) and the superficially beautiful one (Amanda Peet). Interestingly, no one’s drop-dead beautiful, except Amanda Peet’s hard-as-nails big sis.

   Confirming the stereotype of Manhattan as a neurotic zoo, Please Give humorously documents uptown unhappiness in the wild. It’s like catching Seinfeld’s neighbors naked, exposed as craven creatures. Soulless human vessels striving to acquire their indulgences, they bump into one another as they seek to be alone.

   Healthy impulses to do good – the occasional mitzvah – become one more self-gratifying tick to be mocked. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener is skilled at this eerily attuned humanistic satire. She’s amply succeeded with Please Give, creating an often amusing, highly engaging and cleverly constructed send-up of the current state of liberal urban America.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   The solid cast depends primarily on several terrific female performances.

   • Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet nearly steal the movie as sisters damaged by the long ago suicide of their mother, and the ongoing caustic clutch of their grandmother.
   • Ann Guilbert – the ancient actress who was Yetta on “The Nanny” – plays their shrewish grandmother to the hilt.
   • Oliver Platt and Katherine Keener anchor the movie as weak-willed marrieds who are partners in business as well as life, yet whose differing temperaments lead to marital troubles. She’s a giver who makes her living as a sharp-eyed buyer; he’s a natural opportunist who’s not fundamentally a bad guy.
   • Sarah Steele, as their hotness-challenged daughter, shares her father’s pudginess and bad teenage skin, while not sharing her mother’s giving instincts.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Really Great 4.5

8. Male Costars Good 3.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Female sensibilities suffuse this Nicole Holofcener written and directed film. From the opening montage of breast after breast after breast (whoa fellas, they’re undergoing mammograms so are hardly sexy), to the relationships between the adult sisters, and between the daughter of an adulterer and her dad’s lover, men are mostly bit players in this milieu.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    Bravo! One scene in particular has come in for pronounced praise. Let me add mine. A carful of Manhattanites drive north to view the fall foliage. Exiting the car at the designated vista point they are disappointed at the gray view, confirming the gloomy worldview of a dyspeptic grandmother. One of the party wanders a few feet away and gazes in another direction, there to discover a Technicolor panorama of reds, yellows and greens. The others join in – oohing and aahing at the wondrous vista – other than the old shrew, who refuses to budge. Having come so close, she literally misses the beautiful forest for the gray trees of her own sour character. Brilliant filmmaking, this.

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.6

    More breasts than a year’s subscription to Playboy open the movie, albeit they’re repetitively smashed into the unforgiving planes of a mammogram machine. Beyond this, more than a little selfishness rears its ugly head, as does some discreetly filmed adultery.

17. Sex Titillating 1.9

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Salty 1.9

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Capitalism seems vaguely evil in Please Give. Trading in goods that if not hot are still warm makes business seem like a zero sum game. This warped view suffices for Leftist socioeconomic insight.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0