To mangle a Simpsons quote, “someone get this lady a microphone and a stand-up gig, stat!” Nicole Holofcener is hilarious.  Her satire is wicked (Don’t give him money! That’s not a homeless person, he’s a black man in a bad vest waiting for a table outside this restaurant!) and she understands people well enough to roast them and then sympathize (a man in a ridiculous affair realizing his wife is more important to him than sexual affirmation, sitting near her as she expressions her abiding devotion).  But her main concern, I’m gonna insist, is not White Guilt or Being Female or Human Connection or even Family Livin’, but image: how we see ourselves, how we let that view shape/warp/define us. Consider that Please Give is full of characters who read glossy magazines, watch Entertainment Tonight! (a fact that makes it into one woman’s life’s eulogy), and value price and bargaining above value and function. George Clooney, Howard Stern, anonymous Jersey Shore-type glamour are all ridiculed by characters - yet are never rejected. A man claims these tv-fueled photo spreads are a passing fancy, yet upon finding a fellow Star-Struck, launches into his zeal, revealing not an ambiguity but a shame about aiming for Photoshopped Perfection. This film (and Holofcener’s second, Lovely & Amazing) end in near-simulacra of actual tv ads: parents looking fondly on as their daughter, whom they have come to love, finds a definitely cute pair of jeans at a Cost? Priceless! rate; an adopted daughter literally smoothing over the wrinkled family relationship she’s at the core of in a elegantly Perfect™ bedroom set.  What ends up happening in a Holofcener film is a set of characters have and share an anxiety about how they look, how they come off, what they present, and the family resolves their tensions, easing them into a muted middle-class comfort.  (This is probably the opposite of what a lot of people said upon viewing her latest Catherine Keener, c’est moi! picture.) Looking beautiful is a facet of this fascination, giving critics a chance to call Holofcener a feminist-revisionist director, brave enough to examine the flaws and beaten terrain of the human body: a particularly egregious example is in Lovely & Amazing, one self-conscious sister ordering her beau to examine her body for imperfections in its naked nakedness but as revealing emotionally as an After picture in a diet pill ad.  Another facet is Being Charitable: adopting a black girl into an all white female, offering money to drag queens living on the street, feeling like a cheat but also duped when a rival furniture seller purchases a table (which you purchased at a consciously deflated cost) and, here’s the envy, he sells it for more. Catherine Keener does a bold thing and breaks down upon visiting a Special Needs’ Centre, crying as the youth play basketball: her emotional complexity coming through as someone who needs to help others, yet can’t bear to see anyone’s pain for too long.  Her films about NY types ask what these people think they are vs. who they might actually be. A giant mirror that asks the question, to quote this guy: Mirrors fascinate because we all ask the same question of them: What if I like you more than you like me?

To mangle a Simpsons quote, “someone get this lady a microphone and a stand-up gig, stat!”

Nicole Holofcener is hilarious. 

Her satire is wicked (Don’t give him money! That’s not a homeless person, he’s a black man in a bad vest waiting for a table outside this restaurant!) and she understands people well enough to roast them and then sympathize (a man in a ridiculous affair realizing his wife is more important to him than sexual affirmation, sitting near her as she expressions her abiding devotion). 

But her main concern, I’m gonna insist, is not White Guilt or Being Female or Human Connection or even Family Livin’, but image: how we see ourselves, how we let that view shape/warp/define us.

Consider that Please Give is full of characters who read glossy magazines, watch Entertainment Tonight! (a fact that makes it into one woman’s life’s eulogy), and value price and bargaining above value and function. George Clooney, Howard Stern, anonymous Jersey Shore-type glamour are all ridiculed by characters - yet are never rejected. A man claims these tv-fueled photo spreads are a passing fancy, yet upon finding a fellow Star-Struck, launches into his zeal, revealing not an ambiguity but a shame about aiming for Photoshopped Perfection.

This film (and Holofcener’s second, Lovely & Amazing) end in near-simulacra of actual tv ads: parents looking fondly on as their daughter, whom they have come to love, finds a definitely cute pair of jeans at a Cost? Priceless! rate; an adopted daughter literally smoothing over the wrinkled family relationship she’s at the core of in a elegantly Perfect™ bedroom set. 

What ends up happening in a Holofcener film is a set of characters have and share an anxiety about how they look, how they come off, what they present, and the family resolves their tensions, easing them into a muted middle-class comfort. 

(This is probably the opposite of what a lot of people said upon viewing her latest Catherine Keener, c’est moi! picture.)

Looking beautiful is a facet of this fascination, giving critics a chance to call Holofcener a feminist-revisionist director, brave enough to examine the flaws and beaten terrain of the human body: a particularly egregious example is in Lovely & Amazing, one self-conscious sister ordering her beau to examine her body for imperfections in its naked nakedness but as revealing emotionally as an After picture in a diet pill ad. 

Another facet is Being Charitable: adopting a black girl into an all white female, offering money to drag queens living on the street, feeling like a cheat but also duped when a rival furniture seller purchases a table (which you purchased at a consciously deflated cost) and, here’s the envy, he sells it for more. Catherine Keener does a bold thing and breaks down upon visiting a Special Needs’ Centre, crying as the youth play basketball: her emotional complexity coming through as someone who needs to help others, yet can’t bear to see anyone’s pain for too long. 

Her films about NY types ask what these people think they are vs. who they might actually be. A giant mirror that asks the question, to quote this guy: Mirrors fascinate because we all ask the same question of them: What if I like you more than you like me?