Please Give - Movie Review

Please Give is writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s third film. It focuses on a group of acquaintances in New York City intertwined by an elderly woman. Kate (Catherine Keener; Full Frontal, Death to Smoochy) is a bleeding heart; she is overly sympathetic to everyone else’s plights in life and it drives her family crazy. She is trying to save the world one homeless person at a time. It’s an ironic trait for to have considering she and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt; Frost/Nixon, Simon Birch) own and run a furniture shop which they keep stocked by buying deceased peoples’ furniture and selling them at a significantly higher price, and when they’re not occupied with store business, they are raising their fifteen-year old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele; Spanglish), whose biggest problems in life so far are bad acne and being disallowed to buy a two-hundred dollar pair of blue jeans.


The couple has been waiting for their next-door neighbor Andra, a loutish, soon to be ninety-one year old woman, to die so they can purchase her apartment to expand on their own. Andra is looked after by her granddaughter Rebecca (Rebecca Hall; The Prestige, Frost/Nixon) while the other granddaughter Mary (Amanda Peet; Saving Silverman, Identity) can’t seem to wait for the old hag to croak.

Alex and Kate invite Andra and her two granddaughters to their apartment to celebrate Andra’s birthday and suddenly their lives start becoming more and more intertwined with one another. Some of the experiences are good, others are bad, but all of them are challenging because each person is looking for someone or something new to lean on for emotional support.

Please Give is a somber tale about what happens when people and relationships grow old, and when something new and interesting enters your life, it is all about how you interpret the experience and how you react. The acting was fine. No one stood out over anyone else which was a good thing but there are spots in the movie where you might start checking for the time, but the movie is worth sitting through. There are some funny moments but no real laugh out loud scenarios. The humor paralleled the bleak but hopeful story.