Review: 'Please Give'

Nicole Holofcener's smart and many-textured film "Please Give" - the kind of movie that gives the term "dramedy" a good name - opens with a brave montage of women's breasts of all shapes and ages being plopped onto a mammography plate. Shown with clinical nonchalance, divested of sexuality, it tips you into a reality that's alien to 50 percent of the audience. It's illuminating yet discomfiting. Why are we looking at this? What can it mean? The images, frankly, are not a pretty picture.

Yet they establish Holofcener's movie with an almost poetic directness. Midway into the story, the young radiologist performing the mammograms, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), tells a date that she regards the female breast as "tubes of potential danger." Such pessimism tints "Please Give," a funny, wise drama specked with organic, spot-on comedy that would be borderline verité if it weren't so chiseled and right. This is a polished comedy of manners - good, awkward and atrocious manners - with a loose-limbed energy and spurts of the unforeseen that life hurls our way.

Such as dying. Rebecca and her older sister, the spiteful, self-absorbed Mary (a blithely caustic Amanda Peet), are taking care of their 91-year-old grandmother, who lives alone in a spacious New York apartment. The grandmother is played with venomous humor by veteran actress Ann Guilbert, who has a shriveled, simian face, "menopausal red" hair and a grousing, petulant manner. The next-door neighbors, Oliver Platt and longtime Holofcener muse Catherine Keener (this is their fourth film together), are essentially waiting for the old woman to die so they can knock out her wall and expand their apartment.

Rebecca and Mary know this, as does grandma (who doesn't seem to care one stitch), and it makes for modest tension between the parties. But not enough that they don't become strained friends, relationships that go in unexpected directions.

Middle-class females dominate the movie, including Platt and Keener's pimple-tortured teen daughter (Sarah Steele). It's a comfortable milieu for Holofcener that she's explored in the similarly intelligent "Friends with Money" and "Lovely and Amazing." Her touch is light but deep, creating nuanced ensemble character studies that, even when lumpy, are exceptionally satisfying. To relegate them as chick flicks is a mindless affront to the films.

The title "Please Give" underscores the movie's contrasting themes of selfishness and selflessness. If they are presented with heavy-handed obviousness, they still work in illustrating the acute differences of human behavior.

Keener's Kate epitomizes liberal guilt. Evincing an attitude of exaggerated pity, she hands out $20 bills to homeless people and makes timorous efforts to volunteer for needy organizations. It's a way to assuage her shame for buying furniture from families of the deceased then selling it at exorbitant prices in her and Platt's upscale antique shop. (She later concludes that "nothing helps.")

Peet's Mary, a tanning booth queen, is the polar opposite: a blunt-talking, preening harpy who's not without a superficial charm that plays off her manicured beauty. Her frumpy sister Rebecca (Hall's recessive performance is touching) is practically egoless and could use some assertiveness lessons.

Beautifully paced and observed, "Please Give" charts the dissatisfactions of living and the things we do to improve our lot. Happiness is a quest, cruelly elusive, painfully trying and filled with enough lessons to keep it, at the least, interesting.

'Please Give'

Our grade: A-

Genre: Comedy-drama