Please Give
- Year:2010
- Rating:PG
- Director:Nicole Holofcener
- Cast:Rebecca Hall, Catherine Keener, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt
- Release Date:September 09, 2010
- Distributor:Roadshow
- Running time:91 minutes
- Film Worth:$8.50
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
This quirky film feels slightly tired at its core and follows a group of self-involved, but largely uninteresting, characters.
This rather unwieldy story revolves around a number of denizens of a Manhattan apartment block and their visitors. Some are pleasant and some are horrible. The central character - if there is one - is Kate (Catherine Keener in typically good form), who runs an upmarket vintage furniture and home accessories store with her husband, Alex (Oliver Platt). As he bluntly puts it, they "buy from the children of dead people." The liberal and conscionable Kate agonises about her ethical shortcomings, sometimes compounding them in the process. This makes for a few wryly amusing and embarrassing vignettes, such as when she thinks that a black man waiting for a table must be a homeless person...and offers him food.
Kate and Alex have a brattish teenage daughter (Sarah Steele), and they've bought another flat in the building from an abrasive and unrelievedly negative old woman called Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), who gets to stay in the apartment until she dies. If that's starting to seem a tad top-heavy, we also have to factor in Andra's granddaughters. Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is a radiographer's assistant; she's lonely but nice as pie, and visits the old lady regularly. Her sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), a spa worker specialising in facials, is unbelievably rude and bitchy.
It's all a bit quirky and tiresome, but improves (slightly) as it goes on. Not very much of any significance happens in Please Give, and what does isn't entirely plausible. The main problem with the film, though, is that it seems to assume that self-obsessed and charmless people are automatically interesting - just for being people. There's definitely a flaw in that logic.
