FILM REVIEW: Please Give

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on June 22, 2010 - 9:48am
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PLEASE GIVE
 Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt
 
 
Reviewed by Seth Rogovoy
 
 
This delightfully dark black comedy about a married couple that scavenges the apartments of dead people for furniture they then sell at incredible markups in a Soho-style shop and a couple of adult sisters tending to their 91-year-old nasty grandmother who lives next door to the couple is a tour-de-force of character acting that examines real issues of what it means to care and give – to be a caregiver, in other words. You can’t give without someone taking, and the film doesn’t shy away from the different ways in which people accept the role of taker.
 
 
In a film chock full of conflicted characters, Keener, as always, is brilliant, attractive, and complex, but so are Peet, Platt, and the movie’s revelation, Rebecca Hall. Platt is literally the odd-man-out in a film that luxuriates in its examination of what it means to be a woman: a mother, a daughter, a wife, a lover, a nurse, etc. Holofcener’s scenes capture real New York in a way that few have since Woody Allen’s best films of the 1970s, and her opening montage of mammograms is a stunning visual metaphor for what the entire film is about. It’s too bad she had to tack a sentimental ending on the movie, but otherwise it’s off-pitch-perfect.
 
 
This film is currently running at the Triplex in Great Barrington, Mass.
 
 
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic.
 
 

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