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Friday at the Movies

 Nicole Holofcener has always been a hero of mine.


"Please Give," "Lovely and Amazing," "Walking and Talking," "Enough Said," "Land of Steady Habits,"  "Can You Ever Forgive Me" -- This is one stone-cold masterpiece after another. Not a dud in the bunch.


Apparently, Holofcener has struck gold once again with "The Last Duel" (though I haven't watched yet).


This week, Marc and I viewed "the *flawed* Holofcener project" -- "Friends with Money," from around fifteen years ago.


This one has Jennifer Aniston dropping out of her private-school teaching life to become a maid. Aniston's character struggles with self-esteem. When a client proposes an unreasonably low fee, Aniston simply chews her lip and says, "OK."


Elsewhere, Frances McDormand is a deeply embittered clothing designer who has married a man who may (or may not) be gay. 


And Catherine Keener has found herself entangled with a sociopath, a guy who can't bring himself to say, "Are you all right?" once you've burned your wrist on a pot.


As usual, it's Catherine Keener who takes Top Prize. 


She is eager to have an ocean view, so she signs off on a major expansion that blocks the views of thirty or forty neighbors around her. She then wanders from neighbor to neighbor, trying to make nice, and she feigns incomprehension when people give her the cold shoulder. When Keener finally confronts what she herself has done, her face melts. She runs to the construction workers and screams STOP! STOP! -- and she flails her hands. Meanwhile, her husband tries to override her commands. This is the sort of exquisitely awkward scene that Holofcener handles especially well (and she learned from a titan, Mike Leigh).


Another interesting feature in the movie: Holofcener pays close attention to gossip. Again and again, we see one friend discussing another friend, in private. These kinds of analyses are a main part of ordinary life -- yet I think we don't often see these scenes in a big-screen script.


"Friends with Money" is problematic because it doesn't really build to a climax; we're not really sure how Holofcener feels about the Frances McDormand character, and there is a strange Joan Cusack subplot that doesn't go anywhere.


Still, though, B-level Holofcener is more fun than most other movies out there.


It's therapeutic to see all this messiness described so astutely by a master.

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