The line, of course, is from Warner Baxter’s climactic monologue in “42nd Street,” and it’s brought to mind by another Manhattan-centric movie, Nicole Holofcener’s new “Please Give.” (David Denby wrote about it in the magazine last week; read his capsule review. The full review is available to subscribers.) It’s an intimately-scaled urban comedy, but it’s extraordinarily ambitious: Holofcener offers a portrait of how we live now—the “we” being bourgeois New Yorkers who produce ideas, consume services, and are obsessed with things. Few recent movies deal as directly with money and the states of mind it induces (no surprise for a filmmaker whose previous film is titled “Friends With Money”). “Please Give,” with its filigreed sense of skewed conversations and class misunderstandings, is a great pleasure to watch, but one which is followed by a lingering sense of hollowness that remains as strong in memory as the delight. Upon reflection, the problem with the movie extends far beyond the screen, into the state of current-day moviemaking overall.
I won’t redo David’s thorough synopsis; it’s enough to say that the story is anchored by a middle-aged married couple, Kate and Alex (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt), who run an upscale “mid-century,” i.e., used furniture boutique and live with their fifteen-year-old daughter in a prewar building on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square Park. The story is set in motion by their purchase of the apartment next door, in which an elderly woman is still living (and which they’ll take possession of when she dies). Meanwhile, Kate and Alex’s main conflict with their fifteen-year-old daughter, Abby, concerns Kate’s unwillingness to buy her a pair of two-hundred-dollar jeans. And the crux of the drama is Kate’s sense of guilt over her prosperity and its source: her sense that her work—which entails purchasing furniture at a low price from the estates of the recently-deceased and reselling it at a higher price in the store—is essentially immoral and that she needs to take some virtuous action to compensate for it.
The basic subject of the film is in the line from “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” where Oscar Wilde defines a cynic as someone “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The question of the movie is why Kate feels cynical about her job, whether she knows the value—the aesthetic value—of the furniture she sells, or merely the price it should command. By way of contrast, here’s my favorite anecdote about furniture:
The story is told by Jean-Pierre Melville in Rui Nogueira’s book of interviews with him—and it’s all backstory. In order to get at what makes Kate and Alex run—to get at their aesthetic sense and their personal commitment, or lack of it, to the work they do, to the meaning of their connoisseurship and its integration into their lives and their identities—Holofcener would need to open the movie up to more talk, talk that is, in a way, not directly functional. Was one an architect, a designer, a critic? How did they come to run such a store? How do they know what will sell? What is it about the style of the furniture they select that means something to them? We never know how or why they came to do what they’re doing.
Similarly, the class misunderstandings that Holofcener drolly sketches are determined by the hermeticism of the script but are actually implausible given the way that, in this city, and in lots of other places, people of different backgrounds and circumstances are thrown together at work and end up talking. “Please Give” has no room for extraneous conversation—and if its characters have ever had any, nothing in their strict definitions allows them to account for it.
Holofcener’s impeccable ear—and eye—for social cues comes at the price of depth of characterization. Her characters have no backstory, indeed, have no story; they don’t listen to others and they don’t talk about themselves; their lives have been programmed to isolation by the script. “Please Give” is a battlefield in the eternal struggle of the written and the seen, between the planned and the spontaneous, between the concrete and the imagined—and the former all come out ahead. The fabric of the script is so fine that Holofcener can’t bear to rend it, the construction of her interwoven stories (which David rightly likens to a cat’s cradle) so intricate that she can’t bear to dismantle it.
The quote from “42nd Street” is a director’s instruction to a young actress in her first leading role; when she goes onstage, he tells her, she’s “got to give and give and give.” An artist, by definition, gives; and Holofcener’s inability to locate the aesthetic aspect of her protagonists’ enterprise (or, to put it differently, Kate’s and Alex’s lack of confrontation with the presence or absence of the artistic side of their work) voids the movie of its basic substance.
There’s much to admire in “Please Give”—cleverness and humor, nuance and curiosity, and the admirable open-endedness of some crucial matters of plot. The contrast of truth-telling and white lies crops up in a series of scenes that add up to a surprising twist on ethics, and among the many well-calibrated performances Holofcener elicits, Rebecca Hall’s, as a bright young woman in a rut, channels the reflective diffidence of early Molly Ringwald (and I mean that as a high compliment). But the omissions and closures are what remain after the experience is gone; and the strangest of them, in this movie that’s so frank about money, concerns inheritance. Kate and Alex await the death of the elderly woman next door, whose apartment they’ve bought, in order to break through the wall and enlarge their living space. But what of her two granddaughters (played by Hall and Amanda Peet), who turn out to play key roles in the story? They’re also waiting for an inheritance, but one that goes unspoken of throughout the film. The silence is deafening.