I wanted to but couldn't!

From my favorite movies..

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are a NYC couple with a teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele). They own an upscale used furniture store and bought out their adjacent neighbor Andra's apartment once she finally dies. Single nurse Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) dutifully takes care of her hateful grandma Andra. The other granddaughter Mary (Amanda Peet) is a smart-mouthed cynic. Kate wonders if she should volunteer and awkwardly tries to show her generosity.It's a fascinating group of characters but nothing is truly outrageously funny. There is some smirk worthy moments. I like that Kate is not ridiculous but also not normal. These are flawed characters struggling to find connections. Nicole Holofcener finds the lighter moments as well as some deeper personal issues. I wish the two main characters have more connections. The movie is concentrating on Rebecca Hall and Elizabeth Keener but they don't have enough direct interactions together.

"Economics is a form of brain damage." - Hazel HendersonThe privileged berate themselves in "Please Give", an intermittently interesting drama by director Nicole Holofcener, a director who specialises in female neuroses. The plot? Catherine Keener players Kate, a vintage furniture seller who acquires money by selling, at exorbitant prices, the furniture of the recently deceased. She essentially exploits the kin of the dead, getting valuable pieces for less than they're worth because surviving relatives are too preoccupied with grief to haggle over prices. There are other subplots in the film – Kate's husband has a brief affair, Kate's daughter assuages insecurity with commodities, a pair of sisters struggle with love, loss and personal responsibility etc – but it's the money angle that's most interesting. Because Kate is stricken with guilt over the way she does business, she engages in games of self-justification, compensating by being charitable to homeless people or volunteering at special-needs schools. But acts of charity don't help Kate and do little to help others. She remains guilty.The film abounds in interesting contradictions, Kate caught between the dog-eat-dog cynicism of free-market capitalism and an impulse to be ethical, to share with and care for others. Because of this she is supremely self-loathing, ashamed of her wealth. In economics, the neo-classical defence of this, of "wealth", is that the economy is not zero sum, that "wealth" can both forever increase and rationally "spread out", like some perpetual motion machine in which any and all imbalances are overcome by fiscal velocity and "benevolent liquidity". Critiques tout the flip-side; gains here are at the expenses of losses elsewhere, debt based systems breed bondage and loci of power, economics doesn't take into account the acquisition of land and how money enters the system and the economy is pathologically kept afloat by illusions/faith/denial (the continuous birth of new players, the deferring of debt and even death, various false mathematical/philosophical presuppositions etc). In this regard Kate's an atypical American; she's your successful, self loathing liberal woman caricature. Full-bore hippie in Versace.Another of the film's subplots deals with altruism/guilt/exploitation in a different manner. Here, a lab technician (Rebecca Hall) who administers mammograms spends all her free time caring for her 92 year old grandmother, a cranky woman who doesn't appreciate anything Rebecca does. Rebecca's sister, played by Amanda Peet, decries Rebecca for taking care of this nuisance, a nuisance who doesn't deserve to be taken care of and who seems to simply be exploiting Rebecca. Nevertheless, Rebecca believes it is her obligation to "give". So the film – its title is a plea "to give" - abounds in interesting contrasts. Materialism, self-interests, an allegiance to capitalism on one hand, guilt, feigned, forced and genuine compassion on the other. The film then ends with an interesting moment; Kate buys her daughter an inordinately expensive gift, a complex act which manages to affirm capitalism, play to Kate's more selfless desire to "give" - no matter how irrational the act seems - and demonstrates how socioeconomic structures colour selfless acts. Love and charity are seen to be irrational, unsustainable even, under the logic of the dollar. Charity itself is a type of ethic that avoids issues of complicity and co-responsibility for misery, and is maintained largely because the bourgeoisie desires to redress social grievances only in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. That the film fails to go further is because it's engaged in a game of dichotomies, your usual left/right, socialism/capitalism duality.All economics is both biology and physics. It's a transfer of energy. All organisms attempt to maximise the capturing of energy, expending less than they take in. Extrapolate this to the national level and one sees that capitalism itself, as an organism, is designed to maximise extraction. It's what Howard Odum proposed as the 4th thermodynamic law, or 4th principle of energetics; systems "evolve" to maximise intake, leading to the hypertrophic nature of all systems, which have a cancerous predisposition for expansion. Indeed the market, by design, abhors limits. It is obsessed with expansion. Boundaries must be transgressed, worked-around, cheated. What psychologists refer to as the death-drive is mirrored (as well as a lot of other male biological imperatives) exactly by free-market capitalism: there is a pervasive desire for unrestrained, unregulated, limitless "jouissance". You then eventually reach the point where the extraction of energy from people and the planet out-paces birth rates and the planet's ability to "produce energy". It's the clichéd "infinite growth on a finite planet" problem - which in turn has led to proponents of economic homeostasis - though in reality, the planet's not quite finite. The total "matter" on Earth remains the same, the machine just need more of it and faster. And the Earth can't keep up. Hence Kate's dilemma: extracting harms others.What the film does is ignore the fact that personal crises and ecological dislocations are influenced by cultural factors and have their primary sources in social dislocations. The very notion of "dominating nature" has its roots in both the Churches of Scientific Rationality and the constant domination of human by human (hierarchies that bring people into subjugation to gerontocracy, patriarchies, military chiefdoms, capitalist, religious or bureaucratic systems of exploitation etc). Such "ruthlessness", in which a great many humans are as exploited as the natural world itself, is actively supported by many people, under the assumption that this is "how nature is" and "how nature works". These are the same people who, a million times in their daily lives, behave like they believe the opposite. Obey a traffic light and you're asserting man's ability to organise, change, rise, stave off chaos. Nature is contingent, and capitalism actually doesn't require one to believe the worst of his fellow man, but hinges on the opposite, that man is innately "good". In a sense, what is thus required is a legislating of morality.8.5/10 - Worth one viewing.

Many will class this independent work a woman's film - and it is true that the writer- director is a woman (New York-born Nicole Holofcener who is sometimes called the female Woody Allen), three of the four main roles are taken by (attractive) women (Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall), and three of the four support roles are filled by women (two very elderly and one very young). But it would be a mistake to pigeon-hole this movie which is full of wryly humorous and insightful observations on the human condition.Set in Holofcener's New York, this is a character-driven movie with minimal plotting. It concerns the occupants of and visitors to a couple of next-door apartments: a middle- aged husband (Oliver Platt) and his do-gooder wife (Keener) who are planning to expand into the accommodation of an aged woman looked after in very different ways by her daughters (Peet and Hall). At the heart of the narrative is the eternal question: what does it mean to be good.

Though I guess the director would be grateful and happy if you liked her movie. And she got a stellar cast here. And it does make a difference here. Having all those great women playing in it, is elevating the movie quite a bit. Of course the director does try to incorporate as many great turns from women as she can.And she delivers. The drama is good and believable, with quite a few real awkward moments and characters that are more than believable. Art imitating life sort of, if you will. If you like small movies, that do feed of those things, this is the one for you to watch. It might not be perfect, but it is very good indeed. The director is one to watch out for.