Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are lovingly married couple doing their best to raise their insecure teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) who run a successful New York antique furniture business. But Kate is starting to feel insecure about what she and husband are doing for a living, the pair making their fortunes by buying the items on the cheap at estate sales sometimes before the deceased has even been laid to rest.

Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt in Please Give © Sony Pictures Classics

It’s not helping her that they’ve also purchased the apartment of their 91-year-old next door neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert), letting the elderly woman remain living their so that when she finally passes on they’ll be able to renovate and add her space to their own. This not only brings them into close contact with her but also her two grandchildren, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), the situation giving Kate an attack of conscience that on top of everything else in her life she doesn’t have the time to deal with.

Like all of Nicole Holofcener’s (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing, Walking and Talking) deeply personal motion pictures what you see is definitely not what you get with her latest Please Give. The movie offers up a twisted narrative structure featuring a flurry of characters going through various states of emotional turmoil that just about everyone at some point in their lives can relate to. Good morals, parental responsibility, personal character, romantic entanglements, lust, obsession and good old fashioned midlife crises all come into play here, the final product at once both awkwardly funny and unexpectedly moving.

Yet unlike her best and still most timeless effort Lovely & Amazing the seams do sometimes show while at the same time some of the tangents are too shaky and haphazard to be completely successful. Mary’s storyline is by far the weakest, and even though her denouement reeks of authenticity I found the woman to be so utterly unlikable it almost didn’t matter there was a reason behind her self-absorption. I can’t say I was especially fond of Abby all that much, either, and while every teen can relate to what she’s going through that doesn’t make any of her virulent outbursts any less annoying.

But I adored Keener in this, her complex characterization one of the finest of her sensational Oscar-nominated career. She brings so much depth to Kate, so much nuance, that even when I wanted to hate her for doing what I saw as stupid I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, the depth of her moralistic quagmire affecting me on a multitude of levels.

Platt is also excellent, and I love that the film doesn’t let him off the hook for his actions yet also doesn’t pass judgment on them at the very same time. As for Hall, the more I see of the actress the more I find myself falling deeply in love with her. She’s every bit as good here as she was in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, her character being a part of good half dozen moments (including a sensationally moving and humorously awkward first kiss) that brought a smile to my face that came blissfully close to permanent.

What I adore about Holofcener is that she’s unafraid to make her audience uncomfortable. While her films are comedies they go into dramatic territory that can hit extremely close to home. The things she talks about are as constant in the everyday world as sunshine and thunderclouds, the subtle gradations that can transform one into the other the type of thing that seems to interest her the most. 

Please Give is no exception to that rule, and I have a feeling that much like all her previous films this is one that will grow on me the more I ponder it. Funny yet emotional, tragic yet full of hope, this is the type of character-driven story theatergoers could use to see more of, and as like as Holofcener is around here’s hope more is exactly what it is we are going to get.

Film Rating: êêê (out of 4) 

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