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Gawking and Stalking

Nicole Holofcener's movies are like the Olympics - they don't come around very often, so when they do, you hope and pray they are spectacular. "Please Give," her latest tale of angst and misbehavior, is not. It has solid performances, biting lines and a few really well-done scenes, but it lacks the pizzazz of "Walking and Talking" or "Friends with Money," namely because there is almost nobody to care about.

The working title was "Feelin' Guilty" and that's a far better choice than "Please Give," which doesn't mean anything. (Please give what - money? A crap?) In the film, wealthy New Yorkers Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) buy an adjoining apartment from an old, cranky woman (Ann Morgan Guilbert) so they can make their place extra big and fancy when she croaks. If that's not charming enough, they also run a business selling furniture from people's estates at a higher value, so for the low, low price of $1,000, you can unknowingly buy the chair that Aunt Sally died in.

Kate's line of work makes her uneasy, and she overcompensates by handing out $20 bills to homeless people and volunteering to help elderly and disabled kids -- a brief attempt that ends with her sobbing in a toilet stall. She also refuses to buy her teenage daughter (Sarah Steele), who feels fat and struggles with acne, an expensive pair of jeans out of yuppie guilt. But the most obnoxious character in the film is Mary (Amanda Peet), one of the elderly lady's granddaughters. (The other is Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), aka the nice one, although she's a brooding blank.) Mary is a grown-up mean girl who lacks empathy, spends her free time either in tanning salons or stalking her ex's new girlfriend, and has an improbable affair with Alex after giving him an unneeded facial.

"Please Give" is a marathon of malaise, and it's not nearly deep enough to tackle the topics of death, remorse or grief. Holofcener has a knack for dialogue, though, and so there are still a handful of winning lines, like Rebecca viewing breasts as "tubes of potential danger" (since she works as a mammogram technician). She also taps into everyday realities well, such as Kate sitting on the bathtub and talking to Alex while he flosses, or the phenomenon of old women dyeing their hair "menopausal red." But the misguided story arcs and missing heft keep it from ever reaching greatness. Please give us more next time, Nicole.