Indiewire writes of Enough Said’s box office:
$240,000 in 4 theaters; PSA (per screen average): $60,000 Though not unheralded, this new comedy from Nicole Holofcener (“Please Give,” “Friends With Money”) was not expected to open among the top platform grosses for the year, nor to be so clear a winner over “Rush.” It turns out to be Fox Searchlight’s top limited opener since “The Tree of Life” (the company often opens its top films like “Black Swan” and “The Descendants” in more than two cities). This ranks as the third best limited opening of the year (after “Blue Jasmine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines”).
Nicole Holofcener has been kicking around Hollywood as a mostly ignored, but somewhat appreciated, female auteur. Her stories are meditative, modern takes on adult life (remember adults?) – not any that can be plugged into the kind of formula that reaches across age and geographic boundaries but one that has enormous value in its insight. Enough Said was also James Gandolfini’s last film, which is generating more interested that it might have otherwise.
In his review for the New York Times, AO Scott wrote of Enough Said:
This movie will make you laugh and leave you in tears. Some of the pathos is the accidental byproduct of seeing Mr. Gandolfini, so playful and alive, in one of his final major movie roles and feeling once again the loss of his remarkable gift. There is also the pang of the empty nest, that mixture of grief and pride that is the special anguish of modern parents.
But there is also something deeper. The ache that “Enough Said” leaves behind comes from the blunt force of truth. The final scenes have such impact because Ms. Holofcener has struck a buried nerve, uncovered a zone of anxiety, fear and hope that has rarely been explored with such empathy or precision. Eva, like many of us, lives in a world where the rules and roles are puzzling — where parental authority is negotiable, marriage vows are revocable and social boundaries are never clearly marked.
Even so, the primal values of right and wrong — the requirements of compassion, honesty and honorable action — still apply. It is easy to make mistakes and hard to correct them, easy to be funny and hard to be good.
For some reason, the original screenplay category is crowded. Usually the adapted screenplay is where the heat is. But Holofcener should, at the very least, be considered in the category. But it competes against Nebraska, All is Lost, Fruitvale Station, Inside Llewyn Davis, possibly The Butler, Dallas Buyers Club and Short Term. That’s just so far.
