Cinema Mishmash

A personal and random look at movies, past and present

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Friends With Money

November 6th, 2006 · No Comments

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s work is a tough sell for me, because I associate her point of view with that of her apparent muse, Catherine Keener, who so fully excels at playing irredeemably bitter, sarcastic, angry women that I assume (probably wrongly) she is actually not a nice person. The same goes for Holofcener: I think she has a tremendous chip on her shoulder. I haven’t seen her debut, Walking and Talking (1996), but 2001’s Lovely & Amazing is a decent film only because Keener’s (and presumably Holofcener’s) acerbic presence is counteracted by the aspects of the film that affirm some hope in humanity (and by great performances by the rest of the cast, including Brenda Blethyn.) Who is the angriest of them all?With this, her third feature, in which Jennifer Aniston plays loser to a group of successful friends, both Keener and Frances McDormand, and to a certain extent Aniston, channel Holofcener’s bile. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love films that plumb the darker side of human nature, and “bad” characters are almost always more interesting than “good” ones. But for any character to be interesting, she has to have some sympathetic aspect. She has to be round enough to make us care what happens to her. In Friends With Money, the closest we come to this ideal is with McDormand’s character, a successful fashion designer who laments aging, possibly doesn’t trust her husband, and has stopped washing her hair out of existential fatigue (the hair will just get dirty again). For the most part, though, the film serves as an 88-minute rant without any attempt at significance or even an interest in deeper meaning. The final proof that Holofcener’s story has a hollow center comes when Aniston’s unlikely date to the benefit dinner to which one of the titular friends has invited her reveals his big (and unlikely, and lazily convenient) secret. When Aniston learns that her frog may be a prince charming (in the material and superficial sense), Aniston holds back a smirk, as does her creator, clearly pleased by her inflated sense of cleverness. This is the type of conflict resolution a teenage girl would write.

Tags: Drama · Ensemble · Romance

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