Please Give
A delightfully funny and recognisable unpicking of some tightly-woven upholstery.

Kate feels bad about everything. She even feels bad for the ugly yellow chair she’s bought for her shop. If she makes a profit on it, she’ll be pleased – and then she’ll feel even worse about that.

Writer and director Nicole Holofcener provides us with a lacerating account of a couple of well-off New Yorkers struggling with guilty consciences over their comfortable lives. Her other characters revolve around courteous leeches Kate and Alex, who sell the furniture of dead people and have moved in beside curmudgeonly old Andra (Ann Guilbert) in the hope of knocking their apartments into one when she finally pops her clogs.

Holofcener sets up her middle-class audience to feel some empathy for fretful Kate (an excellent Catherine Keener) and her sarcastically practical husband Oliver Platt, then rips into their shallow hypocrisy.

The film’s tasteful façade is close to that of its carefully-drawn characters. It almost conceals the ingenuity of the softly-spoken plotlines and themes of life, death and age.

The miserable selfishness of this Ideal Homes lifestyle is deftly laid bare through Alex’s desperate affair with attractive Mary (Amanda Peet) and wimpy Kate’s ineffectual tears at volunteer centres for disabled children and old people. But Please Give’s self-conscious gentility makes it just a little too easy for urbanite cinema-goers to nod ruefully and then head home to collapse gratefully amid the soft furnishings.

Holofcener seems unable to completely knock down this way of life. Perhaps reluctant admiration for this segment of society makes her criticisms feel unconvincing – and the characters’ inadequacies too simplistic. Their flaws are spelt out with a thick red pen, where a far more discomforting raking over hot coals could still have been possible with a comparable level of subtlety.

The peripheral stories have really interesting potential, but were spread a little thin. Overlooked Rebecca’s slow comprehension of romance was set entertainingly alongside the demands of her prickly grandmother. Yet Rebecca Hall’s portrayal of the shy Rebecca never gets the chance to move very far past wishy-washy – and granny Andra is simply a grumpy old bat.

Rebecca’s sister Mary’s uncompromising self-centredness refreshes proceedings. We never know enough about the motivations for her affair with Alex to really care, just that she obsessively dissects her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s muscly back. It makes for a promising and funny plotline, like much of Holofcener’s tale.

Sarah Steele’s teenage Abby fulfils too many mopey clichés, but her surprisingly wise understanding of the adults around her could have been drawn out.

Perhaps the cast was just a little too large, with too many ideas cluttering some real moments of brilliance. It does indeed seem to be a sketch of people from an external point of view – it would have been rewarding to get under someone’s skin.

Although frustratingly imperfect, Please Give is a delightfully funny and recognisable unpicking of some tightly-woven upholstery.