Please Give: Grade B

B

Please Give (2010)

Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt, Sarah Steele, Ann Morgan Guilbert; Writer-Director Nicole Holofcener.

This film is almost a remake of Holofcener’s “Friends With Money,” another talky-comedy, which was set in LA. This one takes place in Manhattan and has a Woody-Allen feel. Two families are neighbors in a condo. The Keener-Platt couple (and their daughter Steele) have bought the neighboring apartment but allow the old lady living there (Guilbert) to remain as a tenant until she dies. She is tended to by her daughters Hall and Peet.

So what happens? Nothing. In the end, the old lady dies and the Keener-Platts take possession of her apartment as expected. There is no dramatic story line running through this film. Instead, it is about the characters, but they do not develop much over the course of the film. So what that leaves you is a set of little portraits or vignettes. But these characters are ordinary, white, affluent, moderately educated, generally uninteresting people. So this seems like a setup for an extremely boring movie, except that the acting is stellar and the script is moderately witty.

All these actors are so strong that you don’t really care that there is basically no story, no dramatic tension. Little quotidian things do happen, such as the two sisters, Hall and Peet bickering, Platt cheating on Keener, the daughter Steele wanting expensive jeans her mother won’t buy, the anxiety of how much money one should give street people. None of it builds story or character, and none of it contributes to a contemporary theme you could name. But again, the writing is sharp and the acting mesmerizing, and that’s enough to carry the picture.

The Wrestler: Grade A

A
The Wrestler (2008)
Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood; Director Darren Aronofsky.

Rourke is “Randy the Ram,” a washed-up wrestler (theatrical wrestling, not the real sport). He looks great with his chiseled, beat-up face, long blond hair and muscular though sagging body. He speaks in a deep mumbling monotone like Stallone, that gives the sense of a large, dangerous, but confused animal.

He has a heart attack and must quit wrestling. Completely lost, he confides in his only friend, a middle-aged pole dancer (Tomei) at a sleazy club. The similar yet different lives of the flesh these characters lead are parallel. Each of them knows they are too old to be meat-based performers, but neither knows what to do. While much has been made of Rourke’s seemingly autobiographical performance (and it is tremendous) the best moment of the movie is Tomei wiggling around the pole and coming to an epiphany, shown by her facial expressions alone, “What the hell am I doing?” It is a truly memorable moment of film acting.

The relationship between Rourke and his estranged daughter (Wood) is a small subtheme that gives him a chance to display his tender side, but even there the interaction feels genuine and Wood delivers a fine performance. The story is extremely well written, so the parallel between Rourke’s and Tomei’s desperate lives is well defined. In the end, each character takes their drifting life into their own hands, each in their own way. The directing is exceptionally good as well. You get a real olfactory sense of those locker rooms, gymnasiums, and that strip club. A moving film, worthy of its many award nominations.