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June 13, 2006

Friends with Money

Holofcener's latest disappoints

By Tram

Lovely & Amazing was one of my favorite films of 2001. As a female, quite frankly tired of Hollywood's often patronizing take on women, I thought writer-director Nicole Holofcener's second feature was nothing short of refreshing. And being inclined to think of film as a collage of disparate moments, a single celluloid moment in Lovely & Amazing sealed the deal for me.

Following a movie audition, Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) finds herself in an unlikely but fortuitous situation: in bed with hot shot star Kevin McCabe (Dermot Mulroney). Neurotic about her body, she walks out of bed, stark naked, and asks him to examine her body from head to toe. McCabe is puzzled — and for good reason.

It was a scene that can only be written by someone with such keen female instincts. It was a film that Laura Mulvey would have approved of. The lens is seen through feminine — as opposed to masculine — lens. It was nice to see a scene in which the nude female is not used for gratuitous objectification — she was actually exposing herself emotionally.

Holofcener's follow-up to Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money, however, fails to register as an emotionally resonant slice-of-life, let alone lend a unique female perspective — as the former did.

In a story structure similar to Lovely & Amazing, we are introduced to four females — this time they happen to be friends, as opposed to mothers and daughters; and it is money, rather than body issues, that preoccupy the minds of these characters. There is Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), the oddball of the gang; an elementary teacher turned maid who is bankrupt financially - and romantically. Then, there is Jane (Frances McDormand), a successful clothing designer who spends most of her days, swearing at passerbyers and leaving her frazzled hair unwashed. Christine (Catherine Keener) is successful as well; as the second half of a hubby-spouse screenwriting, she is financially comfortable. And lastly, there is Franny (Joan Cusack), a philanthropy-minded heiress who spends most of her time at benefit dinners.

But unlike Lovely & Amazing, there is barely any dramatic tension in Friends with Money. And thus, there is less of an incentive for the viewer to care about the characters.

A number of subplots unravel to tweak our interest, but with ultimately fails to capture our attention with facile characterizations and even more facile resolutions that explain their personal dilemmas:

-Franny's blind date match for Olivia — the fitness trainer Mike (Scott Caan) — turns out to be a fiasco. Mike snatches half of Olivia's wages and ultimately, treats her as a bed buddy and nothing more. (It would only be a matter of time before Olivia finds out about Mike's other life).

-Jane, meanwhile, refuses to wash her hair and shouts at people who allegedly cut in store lines or parking slots (It is later explained that she doesn't have anything new and exciting to look forward to in life.)

-Christine and her hubby, David (Jason Isaacs) experience conflict over the building of an additional story to their house. (We learn that she cares too much about what other people think, and he does not.)

-Only Franny, it appears, to have all the luck - love and money does not seem to be issues that she is currently grappling with. The worst of her and her husband's worries: their son unwilling to partake in the athletic sports his other peers partake in.

If the aforementioned summary sounds sitcom-ish, then by all means, do consider it to be intentional. The pacing of Friends with Money mirrors that of a sub-par sitcom: the plot procedes the characters themselves. Too much time is spent on the plot and resolution, and not enough on the stories behind the characters.

By contrast, in Lovely & Amazing, the characters are the story. Every action the characters took felt like a whim, rather than an excuse to further the plot. There was a palpable sense of tension in anticipating what these characters were going to do next. In the hands of a lesser writer-director, Lovely & Amazing could have been a didactic, Lifetime-like film, chronicling how evil eating disorders are. In Holofcener's hands, it was a perceptive gem about the struggles of everyday identity and life. The mundane became transcendental.

Perhaps the lack of tension in Friends with Money can be attributed to the lack of exemplary dialogue. In Lovely & Amazing, Holofcener's strengths as a filmmaker seem to lie in her wry dialogue; her words in that film sting with bittersweet humor because they're so embarrassingly acute and true in its observations. Miscommunication often arises in Holofcener's comedy of manners. Various forms of tension can be produced from thereforth - including interpersonal and self conflicts. For example, in the aforementioned scene with Emily Mortimer and Dermot Mulroney, the clash of their male and female psyches create friction between the two.

Sadly, in Friends with Money, there is not really any tension - there are only problems floating around, almost aimlessly. Holofcener performs two missteps: first, the dialogue in Friends with Money feels inconsequential. Unlike the resonant dialogue in Lovely & Amazing, which is seeped in bittersweeth truths, the dialogue in Friends with Money fails to sting - there is a short shelf-life. The lines are funny for two miliseconds, and then you begin to wonder: does it add any additional layers to the character echoing these words, or is it merely a soundbyte? I am going with the latter for Holofcener's latest work. Secondly, rather than concentrate on her strengths as a screenwriter with an ear for observational dialogue, Holofcener seems to be overreaching in the plot department.

For all of Lovely & Amazing's merits, Holofcener's strengths as a filmmaker does not include a strong narrative - the strong story and rich characters in L&A simply served as sufficient compensation. In Friends with Money , Holofcener doesn't seem to be aware of her limitations - she straddles too many subplots (there is one particularly unnecessary subplot about the ambivalent sexual orientation of Jane's husband). As a result, many characters are left on the periphery, and Friends with Money ends up not saying much at all about its four heroines.

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