Please Give
The protagonist of “Please Give” buys people’s unwanted antique furniture for her Manhattan boutique, where she sells it at ridiculous markups. She feels guilty about her occupation. I wonder if writer-director Nicole Holofcener feels the same way about hers. She and distributor Sony Pictures Classics are making the same cynical calculation as her hero: that customers will overpay for crap because the venue has a reputation for quality. It’s sadly apropos that the title sounds like a desperate plea for charity. “Please Give” is boutique cinema that belongs in a DVD bin at Wal-Mart. It’s not incompetent, but it’s so slight it’s barely there. Holofcener casts some of the most appealing actors in movies today, including Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall and Oliver Platt, and together they craft some plausible character sketches. But the movie concludes by asking us, without apparent irony, to be moved by a privileged 15-year-old girl getting a bad facial, then buying some expensive jeans. Holofcener can hardly be bothered with aesthetics. She begins with a montage of breasts on a mammogram machine, a cheap attention-getter with little relevance to the story. Then she settles in for 90 minutes of people talking, photographed in purely functional closeups and medium shots and accompanied by a Muzak score. There’s no reason to see “Please Give” in a theater, and that means it’s not a movie. When a show as painstakingly crafted and dramatically potent as “Mad Men” is on basic cable and a film like this is charging admission, the choice isn’t just obvious. It’s a moral necessity.