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At the Movies

 Nicole Holofcener's third major film--"Friends with Money"--is like her "problem play." It's the one that doesn't really work. It's the one that earned just *qualified* praise from Roger Ebert.


If you've seen "You Hurt My Feelings," then you recognize certain recurring sources of interest. Holofcener likes when a couple experiments with brutal honesty; for example, a man might tell his wife that her "ass looks fat." And the wife might say, "I'm not sure I needed to hear that. Just because you believe something, you need to say it? Do you need to hear that your breath stinks?" Holofcener also likes to consider well-intentioned behavior that actually seems to be destructive. In her new film, a son complains that his mother once demanded an inflated grade on a term paper. ("You're welcome?" says the mom. And the boy says, "I earned the bad grade I'd received. I needed to just accept that bad grade.") In "Friends with Money," a patronizing Joan Cusack says that she'll consider offering a loan for a friend's vocational training--"but, first, I really want to pay you to sit down with a good career coach, to figure out what you *truly* want to do." Cusack's infantilizing requirement enrages Jennifer Aniston--and then Cusack feigns, or actually feels, bafflement. "I was only trying to help!"

One of my favorite Holofcener quirks is the fixation on people who are bad at their jobs. We're not used to seeing professionals "fucking up" in Hollywood tales. But the new Holofcener film mines gold whenever Tobias Menzies disappoints one of his patients. ("I'm demanding all of my money back...." "Jesus Christ, did you hear anything I said?") You see this tic in "Friends with Money," as well; Jennifer Aniston is just a bad maid. She steals from clients, has sex in one client's bed, and judges the people she has agreed to assist. This is very funny--and, once again, it makes me feel like I'm watching a documentary about my own life.

Holofcener sees tension where others might just see something banal. In a Holofcener story, a little harmony is a rare, rare phenomenon. To me, this seems like actual life.






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