Please Give

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      Starring Catherine Keener and Rebecca Hall. Rated PG. Opens Friday, May 7, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

      The people in Please Give don’t do so lightly. As usual for writer-director Nicole Holofcener, they are educated, middle-class urbanites, all paralyzed, to different degrees, by their awareness of the inequities in the world.


      Watch the trailer for Please Give.

      The most sensitive, a tense New York antique-store owner (Catherine Keener, who has centred all of the director’s films), is also the most troubled. The store’s wares come largely from the offspring of recently deceased parents and are resold at vast profit. Her jaded, easygoing husband (Oliver Platt) is not bothered by all this one small bit, and that disturbs her even more. (Like the furniture, they are midcentury moderns of uncertain provenance.)

      Their teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) is more animated about the giant zit on her nose, while her parents are increasingly distracted by the decline of their peevish, very elderly neighbour (Ann Morgan Guilbert, who played Millie on The Dick Van Dyke Show). They plan to annex the old lady’s apartment when she goes, which necessarily colours the attitudes of her granddaughters, a kindly radiologist (Rebecca Hall) who visits grandma daily and a perpetually angry cosmetologist (Amanda Peet, in one of her sharpest performances) who can’t stand the old bat.

      Each principal is concerned with weaknesses of the flesh, and to Holofcener’s perfectly attuned ear, their actions and conversations mirror each other in surprising ways. Please Give is funny, but the small developments, and the zingers that fly, are less outwardly jokey than in the filmmaker’s previous Friends With Money, Lovely & Amazing, and the Woody Allen–derived Walking and Talking. As in Allen’s world, these Manhattanites are supremely self-concerned, but an aura of affectionately knowing compassion marks this as a true original.

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