Friends With Money (2006)

Brief: Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) doesn't have money or a husband, but her three best friends do. Franny (Joan Cusack) is happily married to Matt (Greg Germann) and sets Olivia up with her trainer, Mike (Scott Caan). Christine (Catherine Keener) is unhappily married to her screenwriting partner David (Jason Isaacs) and assists Olivia in her product sample hoarding scheme. Jane (Frances McDormand) has stopped washing her hair because her arms get tired, and her husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney), may be gay.

Or at least everyone else seems to think he is.

Oh, Nicole Holofcener, I wish I could be you. Seriously. You are not only one of the few female filmmakers I can think of off the top of my head, but you are also unparalleled in the way you deal with women. Women in the Holofverse are complicated mixes of strong, weak, beautiful, and vulnerable. In a word, they are real. More real than most women you see on the screen, far more real that anyone woman you find in a rom-com. There they are always reduced to stereotypes filled out by women so beautiful that suspending disbelief becomes a Herculean feat.

Perhaps the best part of Holofcener's are the way they only follow the bare minimum of a plot. Plot, you see, isn't something that happens in a real person's life, and it doesn't so much happen in her movies. They're more episodic: she gets such lived in performances out of her actors (the combination of her and her staple, Keener, is nothing short of film magic) that you get the feeling that you are being dropped in the middle of something. Holofcener leaves you in there a while, lets you get to know her characters, gives you a feel for the places, the smells, the people, and then she plucks you not at the end but simply further down the middle. Problems aren't so much resolved as pushed along. People don't undergo the seismic changes you see in more "Hollywood" movies, but you do start to see cracks along the fault lines.*

*I know nothing about such things. That metaphor may be even worse than I think.

I think even less of Aniston than you might presume, so I am pleased to report that she holds her own in the face such enviable talent. She almost, almost, almost nearly sheds her perfect pop princess image for long enough for Olivia to resonate. It's actually what the leads do around Olivia that fill in the necessary details of her performance, but it goes a long way to putting her sitcom days behind her. Of course, I understand that The Break Up undid most or all of this good work, but I still regard it as a start.

Right now the comment on IMDb is "So What?" "So what," kid? This is the "so, what" of life. It's the "so what" of being a woman. If this film is bold, the boldness is found in its honesty. Perhaps that's just too much for some. B+

Also, I recently screened I Love Your Work. I'm not sure I should have done that, and I'm not sure anyone else should either. Giovanni Ribisi leads a bizarre cast as a currently hot star married to another currently hot star (Franka Potente), has a sort of mental breakdown, and begins to remember a very different relationship with a very different girl (Christina Ricci). I spent the first 30-45 minute trying to figure out what the hell I was watching, the next half hour or so in a fugue state, and the final 30 wondering where co-writer/director Adam Goldberg was going with all of this and what was up with Rebel Without a Cause refs and red lighting. I'm left with nothing more than a dazed sensation and a generally vague response of "I guess I watched that." I'm still not entirely convinced that I did, but I must have.