Film of the Week: Please Give

It's taken me awhile to figure out what all Nicole Holofcener is up to with her latest comedy about the uncomfortably comfortably off. It's got liberal guilt jokes, exploiting capitalist guilt jokes (they're the same folks), hate-your-grandma jokes, good reasons to hate your grandma, an extramarital affair that seems pretty improbable - regarding the attractive young woman's motivation, anyway, but then she turns out to be deranged as well as mean.
I struggled to reckon what Holofcener - a fine observer of female insecurity in her first two (and still best) features, "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing" - was trying to say via these and a dozen-some other painfullt comic themes in "Please Give." At this point, though, I don't think it's important to try to boil it down to a portrait of this kind of New York hipocracy or that sort of contradictory materialism. Despite a few behavioral shortcuts to get to cheap laughs, "Please Give" generally takes accurate beads on the gallery of conflicting urges and needs that is the contemporary American mind.
And if that means it seems confused or gets glib in places, well, isn't everything like that these days? Holofcener nails a number of things about how we live now - and internalize and interpret what happens to us while doing so - in "Please Give." Simple descriptions don't apply, and the work would be less honest if they did.