My Aunt Moogs conscientiously made small donations to many different charities; my mom does the same; I continue to do so despite being unemployed. The desire to support causes we believe in (and believing that our doing so helps) runs in the family. So I could identify with Kate's (Catherine Keener's) guilt and angst in Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, now playing at the 19th Street (Civic Little) Theatre in Allentown, at 7:30 tonight through Thursday.
The question is: Where does it stop? Do our small donations make a dent in the suffering all around us? Are our assumptions about charities valid? Once we start giving, the pleas quickly become a deluge. Are we better off making one lump-sum donation to a single cause? Do we stop giving and worry about ourselves? Or do we just do what we can and try not to lose sleep over all that's undone?
In this film, Kate (Catherine Keener) wonders how to justify a purchase of expensive jeans for her daughter when people on the street below her (lovely and amazing) apartment freeze and go hungry. And how does she justify making a profit re-selling old furniture at a huge mark-up, purchased from sellers ignorant as to its value -- does she tell them, and watch her own livelihood disappear? Or learn to live with the guilt?
Nichole Holofcener has an ear for the way real people talk and act, especially women experiencing various degrees of crisis or stasis. She presents her characters as they are, leaving us to judge them, as she does not. Some scenes are uncomfortable to watch, as when Kate's daughter Abby receives a facial and her pimples are literally squeezed, but we cringe as well when Kate attempts to give her restaurant leftovers to an elderly gentleman outside a restaurant. He's waiting in line to be seated, and Kate's and her family's embarrassment at her mistaking him for homeless is palpable. This kind of discomfort -- the recognition it sparks and the questions it raises -- is one of the reasons film can have such power to move us.
The well-to-do vintage furniture store owners Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) have arrangements to purchase (or have already purchased) the apartment next-door. This apartment is presently occupied by an elderly woman (Ann Morgan Guilbert as Andra), grandmother to Mary (callous) and Rebecca (kind and dutiful, played by Rebecca Hall, so beautiful in Vicky Christina Barcelona). Kate and Alex can't expand into the apartment next door until Andra dies. They wonder and worry how this agreed-upon transaction appears to Andra and her granddaughters, and how their friendly (and sometimes calculated) overtures appear. The granddaughters don't seem bothered by the arrangement. And crotchety Andra? There are indications that she may not be too batty to be unoffended.
The acting is splendid all around. Sarah Steele deserves a Supporting Actress nomination for her role as Abby, accurately and perceptively capturing the surface concerns (the desire for expensive jeans), the backtalk, and the depth of a smart 15-year-old girl. During the facial scene mentioned above, her complexion and expression minutely change as she listens to offhand news from Mary (Amanda Peet) that she realizes holds more import than her young heart can bear. I was happily surprised to see Sarah Vowell in a small part as one of Kate's store patrons.
The Roches "No Shoes" perfectly opened the film, a perfect fit in tone and content -- "I complained that I had nothing left to lose/And then I met a manWho had no shoes... "
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