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Louis-Dreyfus: "You Hurt My Feelings"

 Adele once said "the artist of my life is Beyonce." Well, for me the answer is Nicole Holofcener. I think Holofcener is on par with Mike White, and I think she is weirdly undervalued, year after year.


Holofcener made five--actually five--stunning movies with Catherine Keener. These two seem to have parted ways (I can't unearth an explanation), but Holofcener continues to do her spiky, bewitching thing--with Edie Falco ("Steady Habits") and with Mellisa McCarthy ("Forgive Me"). There isn't a single dud in this list of titles.

One theme that fascinates Holofcener is gift-giving. In "Walking and Talking," a couple has a fight about a mole; the fight is really about Anne Heche's controlling behavior. Heche's fiancee pretends to rise above the tension--but he later packs his biopsied mole into a tiny ornamental box, and presents the mole as a "pre-wedding surprise." This awkward moment ("Look, I'm being FUNNY!") is really a display of anger and aggression; a small problem suddenly becomes much, much larger.

In "Please Give," Catheine Keener makes a gift of her soggy, leftover food; she thrusts her paper plate at a disheveled man on the street. "Lady, what are you doing?" says the man, who is clearly pissed. "I'm not begging. I'm here waiting in line for this restaurant. I teach over at NYU." It's almost physically painful to watch this scene, where someone "externalizes" her own inner mess. I think I'm not alone in feeling like I'm watching a documentary about my own life.

Holofcener's newest film has yet another hall-of-fame portrait of "giving"; a married couple meets for an anniversary dinner. The wife once expressed an interest in "leaf earrings," and so the husband has started purchasing a new, awful set of "leaf jewels" every year. The wife chooses a cashmere sweater for her guy--but the sweater is always a V neck, and the husband silently insists that no man should ever wear this particular fashion. ("Why do I need the V? I don't have cleavage.") 

This is, once again, my own life; it was a big victory in my marriage when my husband finally felt comfortable enough to say, "I actually don't like this Jacob Lawrence print that you bought for me."

What is special about Holofcner is that she lives through various awkward moments--but then she takes out her pen. She understands, "Aha, this minute that I'd prefer not to revisit....This minute is actually fertile terrain for a new screenplay." In this way, Holofcener resembles the writer Katherine Heiny, who is also delighted every time one of her own gestures becomes problematic. ("Problematic" is a good word for everyday life, so Heiny has a fair amount to write about.)

There is more to say about Holofcener--but I was just so excited about the V neck. I hope that she has another twenty years of storytelling left (twenty or more).
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