Please Give

City Paper Grade: B-

by Sam Adams

PRETTY PLEASE: Catherine Keener's character is racked with moral quandaries, while her husband (Oliver Platt) doesn't get it.

[ City Paper Grade: B- ]

Nicole Holofcener's fourth feature opens with a pointed salvo aimed at critics who balk at the femme-centric nature of her wry dramas. Holofcener fills the screen with breasts flopping onto a mammogram machine, as if to say, "Now that that's out of the way. ... " Apart from its protagonists' anatomical commonality, there's little in the way of chick flick about Please Give, which treats its characters and its audience like adults with complex needs, not Ephron-bots waiting for the next Motown song or food montage. At the movie's center, as always, is Catherine Keener, here a well-off Manhattan woman who co-owns a vintage furniture store with husband Oliver Platt. While he doesn't see the quandary in scanning obits for potential customers and paying junk prices for pieces repackaged as collectibles, Keener is crippled by guilt. She presses $20 bills into the hands of street people and surfs the web for photos of children with cleft palates. The happier she ought to be, the worse she feels. Pretty much all of Please Give's characters are miserable for one reason or another: Keener's daughter (Sarah Steele) is a teenager with skin-care issues; her neighbor, mammogram tech Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), is stuck caring for her bitter, caustic grandma (Ann Guilbert). Hall's sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), is the least apparently troubled, and least believable, a mean-spirited masseuse whose social tone-deafness makes her a caricature in a movie without the style to support one. At best, Holofcener's technique is nondescript. At worst — a bathroom scene whose edges are distorted by a carelessly chosen lens — it's unsightly. The drawback is more than aesthetic. It deprives the movie of a layer of distance that might make its characters' bourgeois concerns easier to abide. Are we supposed to take Keener's privileged moping at face value? The movie allows no other way. There's nothing wrong with asking audiences to make up their own minds, but Please Give doesn't even ask.