Please Give Written and Directed by Nicole Holofcener
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Oddly, nothing I’ve read about the movie seems to pick up on this, even though it’s spelled out in the title. In the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt dismisses Please Give as a New York story with little appeal for outsiders, while Andrew O’Hehir in Salon and Manohla Dargis in the New York Times both fixate on the filmmaker’s gender. The latter impulse makes some sense, given the movie’s startling title sequence: a series of close-ups in which women’s breasts—large and small, young and old—are plopped on a small plate by a mammogram technician. But what are breasts? We’re so conditioned to think of them sexually we forget their primary function is to give milk.
Holofcener divides her story between two little families, both torn between generosity and selfishness. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) run a midcentury furniture store that they stock by showing up at the homes of old people who’ve died and cutting deals with their children. Kate is a tenderhearted person who constantly presses money into the hands of homeless people, much to the disgust of her 15-year-old daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), who wants her mother to buy her a $200 pair of designer jeans. Meanwhile, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall)—the mammogram technician—and her older sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), take turns looking in on their maternal grandmother, Andra (Ann Guilbert), a sour and relentlessly negative woman who raised them after their mother committed suicide. Rebecca still tries to sympathize with the old lady, but Mary has long ago written her off.
She still comes off better than Mary, her opposite in every respect and her rival for the affections of her husband and daughter. Young, pretty, and tan from her frequent salon sessions, Mary is the sort of person whose harsh judgments of others guarantee her a social edge. She’s no sucker: at the birthday dinner she remarks that she hates to hold a door open for someone without being thanked, or even worse, have the next person pass through as if she were a “fucking doorman.” This kind of talk captivates Abby, who’s at the age when heartlessness passes for truthfulness. When Andra finally expires in front of the TV, Mary tells Rebecca, “She was mean. Why do you think mom took 85 Valium, because her mother was loving and kind?” She’s right of course, but that doesn’t make Mary any less mean herself—she’s just another Andra waiting to happen.
