Beyond the Multiplex

April 6, 2006 | Hanging out with Nicole Holofcener is a lot of fun. That isn't generally the way I would describe meeting film directors in the artificial surroundings of a hotel room and the orchestrated blitzkrieg of a "press day," as I do almost every week. Usually it's like a brief blind date with someone you don't know, but with whom you supposedly have something in common. (They've made a movie, and you've seen it.) It's partly a real conversation, partly a performance and partly a pure business transaction; it's partly friendly and partly adversarial.

With Holofcener, the operative illusion was more like she was the old friend of an old friend, and we had wound up sitting on the sofa at a party, talking about her new movie, which I happened to have seen. A college pal of hers, a Janeane Garofalo-esque hipster type, dropped by and sat in the corner reading Jill Soloway's infamous humor article "Courteney Cox's Asshole." Catherine Keener, one of the stars of the movie in question, "Friends With Money," stuck her head in the door, wearing fabulous sunglasses, and wanted to know whether Holofcener was sleeping. "No, I'm doing an interview," the latter said. "It's not the same thing."

Some of this ease and comfort and good humor is present, at least on the surface, in "Friends With Money." It's often a funny film, made with high production values in a familiar mode, the middle-class marriage comedy. This means, as Holofcener admits, that some viewers will simply miss how ruthless, how sharply observed and how potentially subversive it is. At first glance, and maybe at second too, "Friends With Money" looks like an upscale chick flick, loaded with stellar Indiewood actresses -- Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack -- playing a group of old friends facing middle age together.

I suppose it is an upscale chick flick, as long as you're willing to put the best films of Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh, Albert Brooks and Elaine May -- not to mention Ingmar Bergman -- in a similar category. What "Friends With Money" isn't, despite what you may read elsewhere or imbibe from publicity material, is a lightweight comedy of manners providing reassuring bromides about the essential goodness of Americans or the nurturing power of female solidarity. This is a dense and sophisticated work about mortality, materialism, madness, jealousy and pity, a movie in which the fabulous duds are ripped off the "Sex and the City" gals (Holofcener directed several episodes of that series) and they're left teetering on the edge of the abyss, hair unwashed and wearing stained sweats.

Holofcener's films (the others are "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing") have always tried to transcend both Hollywood fantasy and canned feminist cliché, and "Friends With Money," although her glossiest and most expensive work by far, is no exception. As has been widely observed, the four friends in this movie look real. Their clothes are nothing special -- Aniston spends much of the film in a pair of shapeless blue sweat pants, which is what you'd wear too if you were cleaning somebody else's house for a living -- they don't wear much makeup, and they essentially all look their ages.

Franny (Cusack) and her husband, Matt (Greg Germann), are a fabulously wealthy Los Angeles couple, the proverbial friends with money, and everybody else in their social circle is reacting to their wealth, their loving marriage, their perceived happiness. Christine (Keener) and her husband, David (Jason Isaacs), are screenwriters in a failing marriage. In a last-ditch effort to hold things together, they're building a gruesome top-floor addition to their home, without quite noticing or caring about its effect on their neighbors. Jane (McDormand) is a fashion designer who's having a private, quiet breakdown, refusing to shampoo her hair for weeks on end and flying into unpredictable rage attacks in Old Navy. Everyone seems to think her charming, spritelike husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney), is actually gay, including the gay men who constantly hit on him.

That leaves Olivia (Aniston), the group's designated sad-sack charity case. She's abandoned her so-called career as a high school teacher, and as Franny observes to her husband, she's a maid, a pothead and a single woman with a disastrous dating record. The other three view her with a mixture of pity and distaste, openly discussing the fact that if they met her today, they'd never be her friends. When Franny sets Olivia up on a date with her personal trainer (whose only question is "How are her tits?"), a chain of events is launched that will further destabilize the chemistry between the friends.

It's been said that Holofcener isn't much of a dramatist, but you could say the same thing about Chekhov. Her plot points are more like symbolic markers that identify deep-water spots: Will Jane ever wash her hair? Is Aaron going to sleep with a guy? Will Olivia find a boyfriend who'll actually look at her while they have sex? Is Christine ever going to become aware of the egotistical bubble she lives in? These questions of course are not trivial to the people in the movie, and as I told Holofcener, the people in the movie seemed acutely, even painfully real to me. I didn't always like them, but I felt like I knew them all too well.

Some people, perhaps a lot, just won't like "Friends With Money." Maybe because it takes beloved actresses and makes them into troubled, not-so-lovable characters, or because its glossy movie-movie surface hides a dark and astringent center. Those people are at least getting the point; it's also possible that some people who like it will just laugh at Holofcener's zingers and sail on by. Neither response is wrong. As the filmmaker herself is aware, packaging a difficult, spiny, serious blend of comedy and drama in such a way that millions of Americans will see it is a nearly impossible trick to pull off.

Holofcener takes particular delight in telling me what a grim and depressing tale she has to tell. Absolutely none of the angst of her film penetrates our conversation, although she's obviously pleased that her movie upset me. She's sharp, funny and attractive in a smart-girl way, and could easily pass for 10 years younger than her age (which is 46). She finishes your questions for you and then answers them thoughtfully; she laughs easily and a lot. Like I said, it was a great time.

Next page: "My own self-loathing is definitely in there"