Salina Art Center

Some critics have called Please Give  a “New York movie,” suggesting that its situations, characters, and attitudes strike a special chord with native New Yorkers.  To an extent, this is true.  Director Nicole Holofcener has crafted a biting comedy that deals in large part with the struggle to claim every available square inch of living space available in a metropolis where everybody is breathing everybody else’s oxygen.  But that’s not to say Please Give doesn’t have universal appeal or excludes non-New Yorkers.  One of the film’s strengths is that it opens up the grabby, loquacious, desperate world of Upper West Side apartment dwellers to all viewers, making it accessible, funny, and constantly entertaining rather than smug or condescending.  Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt play Kate and Alex, antique store owners who specialize in ugly 1950’s furniture, turning other people’s castoffs into “kitsch” for the upwardly mobile.  Kate, Alex, and their daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) live next door to Andra (Ann Guilbert), a constantly complaining elderly woman tended by her two granddaughters, Mary (Amanda Peet) and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall).  New Yorkers will readily grasp why two young, attractive, single women would choose to live with their obnoxious, demanding grandmother: apartments don’t come cheap in New York; you settle for any living arrangement you can get.  The reasons that Kate and Alex try to befriend the old woman-rather than avoid her-are a little more complex.  Partly it’s Kate’s liberal guilt (she’s the kind of person who doesn’t just give money to a homeless person-she fixes him dinner so she can enjoy her own dinner with a clear conscience).  Partly it’s because Kate and Alex covet the woman’s apartment, hoping to take over the rent after she dies so they can knock down a wall and expand their own place.  It sounds callous and selfish, which is how New Yorkers are often perceived by Midwesterners, but in the pressure cooker that is New York-which Holofcener helps us understand-it isn’t so vile after all.  Everything depends on context: what would be self-centeredness and bad manners to people outside Manhattan make perfect sense in that environment.  But Please Give isn’t an outsider’s film, mocking New York stereotypes; Holofcener genuinely likes people and will give anyone a chance at redemption.  As she demonstrated in earlier films like Lovely and Amazing, the director does exceptionally well with female characterization (not a given just because she’s a female director!); as critic Roger Ebert says, Holofcener doesn’t “define [women] by their relationships with men.. women actually have their own reasons for doing things-and these are allowed to be bad reasons, and funny ones.”  Holofcener mines comedy out of the stuff of ordinary life, including the big mistakes and embarrassments that mortify us when they actually occur, but amuse us later (sometimes much, much later).  It’s a tightrope walking act, because sometimes turning human foibles into humorous material just makes viewers cringe.  In Holofcener’s films, we occasionally shudder, but with a smile of recognition-and more often with a cathartic laugh.  Keener and Platt are wonderfully deft performers, constantly verging toward the edge of parody but never descending into cartoon caricatures.  They are always real, even when they’re at the end of their tether.  Likewise, Ann Guilbert has an opportunity to go over the top, to be too mean and unlikeable, but she carefully modulates Andra’s egotism and manipulative behavior so it never becomes too unbearable.  The ensemble cast is terrific, helping Holofcener achieve a delicate balance between pain and humor that makes Please Give one of the smartest, wittiest comedies of the year.