PLEASE GIVE
Written & Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Produced by Anthony Bregman
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
USA. 90 min. Rated R
With  Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Ann Guilbert, Lois Smith, Sarah Steele & Thomas Ian Nicholas
 

An opening montage of motley breasts plopping onto a mammogram machine isn’t just meant to get our attention. Cleverly, and with a touch of the squirm-factor, the sequence announces Please Give as a pointed, sometimes uncomfortable, and starkly human affair.

New York City easily lends itself to director Nicole Holofcener’s (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing) understated approach to capturing reality. It doesn’t look grimy or glamorous, but so authentic that the New York viewer will wonder why he’s watching its streets on screen instead of loitering outside, spying on its inhabitants. Please Give is essentially a spy cam, reconstructing the life of Manhattanites with dead-on, almost unsettling accuracy.

Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are your typical well-off couple. They own a vintage furniture store, which they stock by visiting the homes of the recently deceased and buying the goods at a fraction of the resale price from grieving family members. Stuck somewhere on the crossroads of the money-hungry American instinct and conscientious liberal guilt, Kate tries to assuage her conscience by giving alms to every vagrant, nut, and trannie on her path.

Adding a punch to Kate and Alex’s grim-reaper cred, the couple is waiting on the death of an elderly neighbor—crabby to the point of horrible—whose apartment they purchased to eventually renovate and connect with their own. But the granny’s sour disposition is nothing compared to her granddaughter’s (Amanda Peet) blatant hostility. With a George Hamilton spray tan and a sadistic attitude that overshoots “no-nonsense New Yorker” by a mile, she finds a counterweight in her sweet-as-peaches, self-deprecating sister (Rebecca Hall). Both actresses give precise, honest performances, but Peet rises to the greater challenge by lending her unsavory character a dose of our pity.

Please Give isn’t rife with grand revelations about human nature but does a number on contemporary urban mores. When Kate tries to volunteer with the elderly or the mentally challenged, her patent sadness at their suffering almost disgusts the program managers, who shoo her away at the first sign of her tears. Kate’s melodramatic reaction to watching young adults with Down syndrome play basketball is certainly excessive, but our fear of acknowledging the difficulty of living with a disability may be equally absurd.

The film peers through the blank stare of the woman on the subway car on your morning commute and looks through the wall of the adjacent apartment. The result is a messy, contradictory, and infinitely entertaining image of what it means to be human. Yana Litovsky
May 1, 2010