Wealthy people in film aren’t particularly sympathetic. Maybe the cinema brings out the Trotskyite in me but when it comes to upper-middle class crisis I find it extremely hard to be sympathetic. On paper Please Give is precisely the kind of thing I can’t stand. Cathy (Catherine Keener) and her husband (Oliver Platt) make their living from acquiring furniture from estate sales for a steal and then selling them for hugely elevated prices at their hip Manhattan store. Business is good but pangs of guilt are starting to bother Cathy– a guilt that she attempts to offset by being wildly generous to the homeless of her neighbourhood. Are you feeling a verse of ‘The Internationale’ coming on yet?
Well don’t be too hasty; thanks to writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s excellent script, Please Give has a self-awareness and warmth that is missing from the likes of Noah Baumbach’s work or Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.
The cast of characters are very well realised as a patchwork of good and bad and there are some effecting turns from Rebecca Hall as the isolated care-giver of her irascible grandmother and Oliver Platt in a rare dramatic turn as Cathy’s straying husband. Most important though is Catherine Keener’s turn as Cathy. Keener brings her usual easy charm to a role that could have been completely unsympathetic. The film does not ignore the absurdity and sometimes offensive condescension of Cathy’s bourgeois guilt but does not take the easy route of caricature.
The ending also has a nicely ambivalent tone to it– as Cathy decides that she really is a “good person” not by closing up business but by returning one item she acquired from a grieving son, and noticeably keeping the tidy profit she made on the rest of the bounty.
An interesting, grown-up character piece with a morality that is much less straightforward than it would seem at first glance. I could have done without the mammogram montage of the opening credits but that’s a small quibble.