Friends With Money, the new film by Nicole Holofcener
(Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing), is a
bit like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts in being a collection
of separate but intertwined stories set in contemporary Los
Angeles, but it is much cozier. This is not only because there are
fewer stories and they are more closely intertwined, but also
because the stories all center around their subjects’ domestic
lives — or the point at which their domestic lives intersect with
their more or less uncertain sense of who they really are. Lurking
beneath this persistently unstable sense of self, particularly on
the part of the film’s women, lies something of the feminist fear
of loss of identity by taking on one’s husband’s — which is one
theme that links the film with Ms. Holofcener’s earlier work.
Christine (Catherine Keener) and David (Jason Isaacs), for
example, are married screenwriters collaborating on a script about
a bickering couple. As they write by role-playing, reading the
parts to each other, it is unclear where their characters stop and
they begin. The tensions between them are exacerbated by David’s
need to dominate — and the fact that they have not been sexually
intimate for a year. Christine seems to be expected — and to
expect herself — to shoulder a share of the blame for this marital
breakdown, but it is more likely that David’s overbearing
self-sufficiency must compensate for his dependency on her in their
intellectual collaboration by refusing her any of the physical
kind.
In addition to Christine and David’s, we have the stories of
Jane (Frances McDormand) and Aaron (Simon McBurney) and Franny
(Joan Cusack) and Matt (Greg Germann). The three couples, all
friends, all apparently prosperous and well-established, have
adopted as a kind of mascot the impecunious Olivia (Jennifer
Aniston), who has quit her job as a schoolteacher and gone to work
cleaning up after well-to-do people like her friends. The others
make it their project to fix what they see as the broken life of
sweet but spacey Olivia. She is “not married, a pot-head, working
as a maid” — and, as we also learn, still pursuing a married lover
who has broken it off with her. When a sad sack of a would-be
employer (Bob Stephenson) persuades her to reduce her already-low
price for cleaning his shambles of an apartment, she says: “If he’s
so pathetic he has to haggle with the cleaning lady, he’s worse off
than me.”
Franny, the friend with the most money, arranges a date for
Olivia with her personal trainer, a boor named Mike (Scott Caan),
who is so oafish when they meet that Olivia asks him: “Are you
stupid?”
Mike thinks for a moment. “Kind of,” he says disarmingly.
That she not only settles for this clod but takes him along with
her on her cleaning jobs, consents to sex with him in her
employers’ beds — sometimes while she dons a sexy maid’s uniform
to gratify his fantasies — and gives him a share of her earnings
in return for his merely notional “help” is meant to suggest that
she suffers from “self-esteem” problems. To me that strikes a
slightly false note. The author is trying to explain Olivia to us
instead of just letting her be Olivia. Her over-imagined
psychological complications are not necessary to account for such
fecklessness and sluttishness.
There are other ways, too, in which we get the annoying sense
that Ms. Holofcener is trying to prove a point, or proffer an
unneeded explanation of her characters’ foibles. The much-too
tightly wound and competitive Jane, for instance, seems to be
suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression. Meanwhile, everyone
but Jane herself imagines that her easy-going and slightly
effeminate husband Aaron is gay. When he meets someone so much like
himself that he is also called Aaron (Ty Burrell) and they become
friends, we think we know what will ensue. Except that it doesn’t.
As the two Aarons enjoy a much too nourishing and well-presented
lunch alone together while the wives are at work, one says to the
other: “Just because you care about what you wear, it doesn’t mean
you’re gay.”
“Absolutely!” agrees the other enthusiastically. “I love your
shirt, by the way.”
And so another stereotype bites the dust.
There’s nothing wrong with busting stereotypes, of course, but I
rather resent being made to feel that the stereotypes are only
there in the first place in order to be busted by someone with an
agenda in busting them. There is more subtlety and much more humor
here than in the barely-disguised political tracts of John Sayles,
for example, but at times we have the same sense that we have all
the time in his films: the sense of being preached at. Fortunately,
it is infrequent enough that it doesn’t interfere with most of what
there is to be enjoyed here. People worry about growing old or
unattractive; they get divorced or have problems finding a
direction for their lives, but their various stories are never
quite reduced to the level of soap opera. They are just real
enough, and funny enough, for that.
Especially impressive is the way in which Ms. Holofcener manages
to hold in equilibrium the opposed forces of self-satisfaction and
desperate anxiety in her characters, and so gently to satirize them
without ever losing our sympathy for them. This feat is nicely
summed up in the toast offered by one of them at a charity dinner
on behalf of Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS: “To the fact that
we don’t have ALS — or anything horrible.”
“Yet,” mutters Aaron.
Like its characters, the film is rather full of itself but, also
like them, it is never less than enjoyable.
