Please Give

Roles like this are treasure greater than gold for for indie royalty Catherine Keener. Currently enjoying a comfortable niche in limited release, Please Give screens at the San Francisco Film Festival this week, and earns “Outstanding” status from the opinion compilers at MovieReviewIntelligence.com.

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

This gorgeous film, always tender and sometimes dark, is a deeply resonant comic drama that’s concerned with nothing less than life, death, love, sex, guilt and the urban logic of mortality… it’s a fully dramatized and richly detailed account of fatefully intertwined lives… In a film that constitutes a showcase for the actor’s‚Äîand director’s‚Äîcraft, [Catherine Keener’s] Kate is a memorable character played by a particularly wonderful actress whose recent performances seem to have been stripped of all artifice. Ms. Keener has the gift of quietude. She can broadcast fondness in absolute silence, radiate love and turn rueful or reflective in the blink of an eye.

Manola Dargis, The New York Times:

Few American filmmakers create female characters as realistically funny, attractively imperfect and flat-out annoying as does Ms. Holofcener, whose features include “Friends With Money” and “Lovely & Amazing.” You may not love them, but you recognize their charms and frailties, their fears and hopes. They may remind you of your friends, your sisters or even yourself, which makes them attractive and sometimes off-putting, an unusual, complicated mix. We don’t necessarily or only go to the movies to see mirror versions of ourselves: we also want (or think we do) better, kinder, nobler, prettier and thinner images, idealized types and aspirational figures we can take pleasure in or laugh at in all their plastic unreality. The female characters in Ms. Holofcener’s films don’t live in those movies: they watch them.

Poster and a few more review highlights after the cut.

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Kate, the Manhattanite wife and mother played by Catherine Keener in Nicole Holofcener’s marvelously observed new domestic drama Please Give, is a vivid catalog of ambivalences familiar to millions of women of a certain boomer age and socioeconomic level…. with their shared characteristics of sex, age, motherhood, and brunet hair, Keener has ¬≠become Holofcener’s artistic alter ego. In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

You always know where you are in a Nicole Holofcener film, and that’s the here and now. No American writer-director has her exact sense of the way some of us live today, not to mention her ability to precisely calibrate the effects she’s after. With her new film, the poignant and funny “Please Give,” Holofcener is at the top of her game…

Front and center in this film, as she has been in each of Holofcener’s previous three, is Catherine Keener. She’s an actress whose intelligent and empathetic naturalness, her ability to inhabit troubled, anxious characters who achieve moments of comfort (though rarely joy), is a perfect fit for the writer-director’s sensibility.