Film review: Please Give

Published on Thursday 17 June 2010 19:04

PLEASE GIVE (15) **** DIRECTED BY: NICOLE HOLOFCENER STARRING: REBECCA HALL, CATHERINE KEENER, AMANDA PEET, OLIVER PLATT

JUST as Noah Baumbach benefited creatively from a New York-to-LA location switch with last week's Greenberg, fellow indie auteur Nicole Holofcener travels in the opposite direction and manages to deliver a spiky, sophisticated, grown-up comedy that's much more open-hearted, sympathetic and insightful than her relentlessly misanthropic previous film, Friends with Money.

Please Give finds Holofcener regular Catherine Keener on typically magnificent form as Kate, an antiques dealer feeling increasingly guilty about her vocation: buying up furniture from relatives of the recently deceased and then selling it on at a vast profit to New York's status-obsessed upper-middle classes.

Her feelings of unease at her own comfortable existence are amplified every time she runs into Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a radiology technician whose acid-tongued 90-year-old grandmother, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert) lives next door to Kate in a flat that Kate and her business partner husband Alex (Oliver Platt) have bought with a view to expanding their home into it once granny pops her clogs.

If that makes Kate sound horrific, Holofcener's non-judgmental approach ensures we see her – and all the film's characters – as fully rounded people rather than types in a film in which any redemption is undercut with a pleasingly honest air of ambiguity.