All the Small Things

Elizabeth's older sister Michelle (Catherine Keener) is an artist, of sorts. Restless in her marriage and devoted to her young daughter, she spends her time making teeny chairs out of wood and feathers, pointy and fragile. (Her husband has a habit of stepping on them, accidentally, of course.) Michelle is trying to sell her chairs to a local gift shop. "Don't you wish you were little enough to sit in them?" Michelle asks the woman at the counter, smiling a little too brightly. The clerk rolls her eyes, then says no thanks to the chairs. Michelle grumbles, "Bitch."

Each unhappy in her own way, Elizabeth and Michelle form the intriguing center of Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing. Like her first film, 1996's Walking and Talking, this one deftly and indirectly considers the complicated relationships of ordinary -- difficult, sexual, insecure, insightful -- female characters, in this case, the 30-something sisters; their mother, Jane (Brenda Blethyn); and adopted sister Annie (Raven Goodwin). It's hard for all of them to say what they mean, to feel like themselves, to be girls.

As the film begins, Jane is going into the hospital for just a bit of liposuction, so she can "feel better about herself." Her daughters are apprehensive, but even as they reject Jane's concerns about how she looks ("at her age"), they act out similar concerns. Model-thin Elizabeth looks at herself and can only see "flabby" arms, a perception encouraged by her self-absorbed boyfriend, Paul (James LeGros), who's increasingly exhausted by her fretfulness. Michelle has developed more effective emotional armor than her sister, but at this point, her frustration has turned into serial arguments with her husband (Clark Gregg) about the fact that she's never had a paying job. Reluctantly, Michelle agrees to take Annie while Jane's in the hospital, but it's not a wholly copacetic pairing. Elizabeth, a self-assigned fixer (she regularly brings home stray dogs), takes over.

Annie's concerns reframe everyone else's. Black and just 8 years old, Annie is beginning to articulate her own complex insecurities, stemming in part from her interracial adoption (she's loosely based on Holofcener's own adopted brother) and in part from living with this particular family. She tells Jane that she wishes she had white skin like hers, and she admires the straight hair of her Big Sister, Lorraine (Aunjanue Ellis). Annie's also slightly overweight, and unsurprisingly, given the weight-concerned women around her, both overly conscious of it and resentful of her awareness.

Each character has to deal with her own anxieties, and each undergoes some minor epiphany during the course of Lovely & Amazing. Annie begins experimenting at the pool where Lorraine is teaching her to swim, pretending that she's drowned, an apt metaphor for her current fears of loss and abandonment. She persuades Lorraine to straighten her hair, raising still more questions about how both familial inheritance (nature and nurture) and commercial culture shape apparently "individual" desires and dispositions.

Jane's surgery results in complications, leading her three daughters to re-evaluate their own ambitions and disappointments. Elizabeth goes on yet another audition, a "chemistry test" with a famous Hollywood star, Kevin (Dermot Mulroney). She doesn't get the part (not being "sexy enough"), but spends a night with him, during which she persuades Kevin to tell her exactly what's "wrong" with her body. His helpful suggestions? "I like your breasts" and "In a perfect world, your ass would be rounder." Elizabeth thanks him for his honesty, and he feels oddly fulfilled.

Meantime, Michelle embarks on her own almost-affair, with her new boss at the local Fotomat, 17-year-old Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal). While they're making out in her car, he discovers her hand-drawn wrapping paper (another unsellable art project) and exclaims, "I'd buy this in a second!" She appreciates his passion, as well as the first sincere attention she's received in years.

The film's emotional specificity, its very smallness of scope, is enormously rewarding. Shot on digital video by Harlan Bosmajian, the film achieves a refreshing intimacy and complexity, never pushing too hard, never revealing too much. Even as the girls in Holofcener's world have their own problems, they provide acutely familiar reflections.