Please Give – Review

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A solid indie in a year filled with them

It’s interesting to note that amongst all the great and famed actor-director couplings over the years, from Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro to Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. It’s amusing that Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Keener is one that is never mentioned. Going on their fourth film together, Holofcener manages to get a unique performance out of here. And she does so again with Please Give, another small indie film in the vein of Friends with Money.

Keener stars as Kate, a small business owner with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt). They run a lucrative vintage furniture shop, buying up the furniture and accoutrement of people’s dead parents and selling it for a massive markup. They have a teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) and a next door neighbor (Ann Guilbert) they’re waiting to die so they can expand their apartment into hers. She has two granddaughters that are polar opposites: Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is the nice one, always walking her dog and buying her groceries. Mary (Amanda Peet) is a bit obnoxious and caustic to those around her in a way that is not endearing.

The film’s focus is on Kate trying to find a reason to justify what she does for what is obviously a successful living. Alex obviously has no qualms with it but it’s in how he deals with her guilt that makes the film. As they go along for the film’s running time, the main theme of the film is acceptance. Kate can accept the fruits of a nice lifestyle, including the ability to own an apartment in a nice New York neighborhood, but has never really gotten comfortable with the idea of selling the goods of the deceased. It’s a main driving point of the film, guilt about the good life, and as they move forward things conspire to remind her of it. As rival store owners buy their product, and mark it up for even higher prices, it becomes fascinating to see how both end up dealing with Kate’s guilt. Kate ends up giving money and food to the homeless in their neighborhood, Alex ends up having an affair with Mary and in the meantime Abby gets fixated on a pair of expensive jeans.

Kate’s guilt is what drives the film and it’s not surprising that Holofconer would put Keener in the thick of things. Always able to get a quirky performance out of her, she puts Keener in the sort of role she generally is very good at: someone aging gracefully physically but perhaps not mentally. Kate is an emotional basket case at times, guilty about living a good life when others don’t have what she has especially in light of the fact that they buy their product from the “children of dead people” as Alex eloquently puts it. Keener has the grace to be able to pull it off admirably as there’s a comfort between actor and director that’s on display here. This isn’t risky material for Keener but she’s got a director good enough to bring more out of it than it could get. It may not be her best performance but it’s certainly up there.

It’s hard to say that of the film, which feels padded even at 90 minutes. Moments featuring Andra and her granddaughters are shoe-horned in, with sidebars taking the film into places and storylines that take away from the film’s main focus on Kate and Alex. There is plenty of material to mine with the two, including the moments when they buy the furniture from the grieving children, and yet the film would rather work on subplots involving Rebecca and Mary instead of putting the focus on the meatiest characters.

Please Give is a nice independent feature but certainly not the best work of all involved.


Director: Nicole Holofcener
Notable Cast: Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Sarah Steele, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet
Writer(s): Nicole Holofcener