Please Give (*½)
Directed by: Nicole Holofcener
Starring: Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt,
Thomas Ian Nicholas, Sarah Steele
Seen: August 28th 2010
*½ Out of ****
Cathy (Keener) and Alex (Platt) are wife and husband and they share
their apartment with their 15 year old daughter Abby (Steele). They run a small
furniture store which they stock by buying old furniture from the families of
the recently deceased at very low prices, since the families want to get things
done and also because mostly they know nothing of the value of said furniture. Their
next door neighbour is an old lady by the name of Andra, who is 91 years old
and holding on to life with all she has in her. Cathy and Alex have already
purchased Andra’s apartment, and are planning a re-modelling and expansion of
their own apartment once Andra dies. Andra’s two granddaughters are Rebecca (Hall)
and Mary (Peet), who cannot differ more. Rebecca is pale and shy, and works as
a radiologist, mostly administering mammograms, while Mary is extremely tanned
and very outgoing, and is a beautician or cosmetologist.
In an effort to humanise their impending “inheritance”, Cathy and Alex
invite Rebecca, Mary and Andra to join them for dinner, to get to know everyone
a bit better before the nasty business of Andra dying and the apartment opening
up. In her efforts to assuage her guilt for selling the furniture of dead
people and unconsciously wanting Andra to die, Cathy not only tries to be as
civil as possible with Andra and her granddaughters, but she also goes out of
her way to give the homeless people on her street money on a daily basis – so much
so that she has little left for her daughter. Alex flirts with Mary during
their dinner, and he goes to Mary for a facial that soon turns into an affair
in her consultation rooms. Abby struggles with her acne and the fact that her
mother would rather support the homeless than give her a dollar. Rebecca meets Eugene
(Nicholas) through one of her patients and together with her informal
friendship with Abby her life seems to slowly become a little more colourful.
Please Give is a pointless movie, the story goes nowhere pretty
slowly, and there is practically no positive character development. Cathy does,
in a way, learn that charity has to start at home (or so I hope) when she
eventually seeks to spoil her daughter, even if it is just a little bit, with
money she could have given to beggars. Alex isn’t brought to pay for his
infidelity, and Mary also continues with her life as if nothing happened. Abby
is pleased with a physical gift by the end of the movie, and you really don’t
sense any movement for her as a person either. The only person to really move
forward in Please Give would be Rebecca, but her side of the story is eventually
almost handled as a throw-away bit of film added to get the running time of the
movie up to feature film length. Please Give is a pointless movie and much like
the change the characters experience during the short 90 minute running time, I
will go on with my life having taken nothing away from this, apart from a
ticket stub that, in a year’s time, will probably baffle me since by then I will
not remember having seen this stale movie at all.
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