Friends
With Money is a charming and extremely funny look at the various ways in which
money (or the lack thereof) effects our lives and particularly our relationships
with loved ones and Friends. Writer/Director Nicole Holofcener has also given
us such winning fare as Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, and the fact
that this keenly observant ensemble piece was chosen as the premiere film for
the opening night gala of Sundance 2006 is testimony to the fact that Holofcener
has arrived as not only a vibrant voice, but a standard-bearer in the changing
landscape of American cinema.
In
it’s candor and jugular jousting way of keeping the laughs coming fast and
furious, Friends With Money compares favorably to the best work of both Woody
Allen and Steven Soderberg. Her defining comedic M.O. is to serve up the punchline
as the first words uttered after cutting away to a new scene. A devise that she
doesn’t abuse, but uses to marvelously funny affect. Her writing also plays
to the strengths of her cast in a way that is beyond uncanny. Part of this comes
of having worked with certain cast members in the past, but it is no less amazing
to watch Frances MacDormand’s un-self-conscious loose-cannon personae just
go off like runaway shopping cart full of dog doodey and dynamite.
As
a director she just has that knack for knowing how to set her actors up so they’re
swinging confident wood in their wheelhouse and the characterizations are so genuine
that if you don’t know people like these you certainly have no doubt that
they exist. Conversely it could be argued that anyone could direct a cast of this
caliber - Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener and Jennifer Aniston join MacDormand as
the female nucleus of this ensemble. A group not brought together by circumstance
and coincidence (Ala. Robert Altman) rather a group of friends who have remained
close from high school and college well into early middle age.
Though
she’s never been a story-teller, Holofcener has a masters eye for this kind
of group dynamic and dives into it’s many quirky dysfunctions with a fiendish
pleasure that borders on the sadistic. Financially, the gals are all set well
enough (Cusack’s character being the obscenely wealthy one courtesy of family
inheritance) with the exception of Aniston who washed out as a high school teacher
and now cleans people’s houses for a living. She is the poster child of the
groups constant concern, joking and gossip - she smokes pot, wallows in her low
self-esteem and is in love (or at least still obsessed) with a married man with
whom she carried on a short-lived dalliance. Kind of a big city version of her
character in The Good Girl with a screw-it attitude and a bevy of rich friends
to watch over and judge her.
MacDormand,
God love her, gobbles up the scenery as a successful designer of her own line
of women’s high fashion, whose own slovenly appearance has been exacerbated
of late due to her growing aversion to shampoo. Her marriage is not a close and
passionate one, but she loves her husband (Simon McBurney a Roman Polansky look-alike)
whose effeminate manner is the fodder for gay jokes among the gals as well as
wrongful assumptions regarding his sexual preference from gay men. MacDormand
is hilarious in a running gag where she is all but ignored by waiters who can’t
help but dote on her husband, “can I get another cup of coffee for the love
of God - or has the man fallen off the face of the earth?”
It
is Keener’s marriage that is in trouble. She and her husband are a screenwriting
team in the midst of a home renovation that has caused them to become the pariahs
of the neighborhood. Her husband (Jason Isaacs) isn’t the least bit troubled
by the fact that their neighbors, who had always been friends or at least friendly,
are suddenly firing withering glares across the street or through the hedges.
Little things like this as well as professional disagreements are now rapidly
eroding the respective shores of the gulf that exists between them.
The
title of the film is a bit deceptive in that money issues or more often used as
subtext and don’t really amount to all that much in the plot. The issue of
money as it relates to the film is best summed up by the idle musings of Cusack’s
character. There is a scene where she asks Keener, “hypothetically”
if she thought that they’d be interested in Aniston’s character as a
friend if they hadn’t known each other for years and they happened to meet
today for example. Sadly they both agree that the answer would probably be no.
Happily, Aniston’s character enjoys the last laugh in that regard.
Fortunately
Friends with Money doesn’t dwell on a lot of pathos, Holofcener had the good
sense to realize that with an opportunity like this, where laughs seem to come
out of the woodwork, that she should capitalize. And that she does. They come
by way of knee-slappers, medium-sized chuckles all the way down to quick snickers,
but Friends With Money will have you smiling throughout. Best of all the laughs
arise naturally from the situations and with women this adept at comic timing
the humor flows effortlessly, like a master composing for four gifted performers,
Friends With Money comes across much like comedic chamber music.
