Interview: Nicole Holofcener of "Please Give"

In today’s world, you don’t have to go to Africa or the inner city to be confronted by materialism, disparity, need, and selfishness. They’re as close as a next door neighbor, a homeless man on the sidewalk, a teenager’s desire for designer jeans, and our own hearts.

I sat down with Nicole Holofcener, a New York director and screenwriter who has her finger on the pulse of modern womanhood, or at least the New York version of it, about her new movie “Please Give.” This films deals with how one remains compassionate in a privileged and busy world, and whether it’s possible to raise children to see beyond their own sense of entitlement.

“Too bad I don’t have any of the answers,” Holofcener laughed, “just questions and confusion like every body else.”

While she may not have the answers, in “Please Give” she  she acutely asks the questions.. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are a happy New Yorker married couple. They buy furniture from the children of deceased people, who see it as useless junk, and then mark it up in their hip shop as vintage treasures. Business is good, good enough that they’ve bought the apartment next door from an elderly neighbor, with plans to renovate it once she, you know, passes. The crotchety woman’s granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet) care for her, Rebecca with gentle compassion and Mary with exasperated anger.

Alex feels no qualms about this life, but Kate is torn apart by having so much riding on the deaths of others. When her teen daughter Abby (Sarah Steel) insists on buying $200 jeans, Kate can’t reconcile paying so much for clothes when she passes homeless people on the street outside the store. As Alex feels more disconnected from his wife, he is drawn to their neighbor’s pretty granddaughters, while Kate sees the kind heart under the other’s shy exterior.  Rated R for language, sexual content, and nudity, this is a film for adults about what it means to be an adult.

It’s all an ethical tangle, no less so for reflecting everyday Americans’ feelings. It’s done with honest, sometimes blunt, dialogue and a refreshing lack of neat solutions. Very much an indie film, you won’t see explosions or car chases, but you will be drawn in by vivid acting, relevant issues, and a little-too-close-to-home humor.

As few of us care to admit about ourselves, Kate’s attempts to help others are less altruistic than they appear.

Holofcener feels this dynamic in her own life. “Well, I think that my own attempts to volunteer, they’re always selfish, but I’m not a bad person. I still care about others and want to help and be valuable, but ultimately it’s selfish. I want to feel better about myself, but for good reasons. Most of my attempts to volunteer have been disappointing, not what I expected, calamitous, dangerous. Sometimes I volunteer and there’s too many volunteers. All us white people in one room trying to do good and there’s not enough for us to do.”

Another fascinating theme in the film is the idea of stuff, which seems so important in life, outliving its owner. Kate calls on people who have lost relatives and, in the midst of their grief, are overwhelmed with the task of sorting through and disposing of their possessions. She’s confronted with the emotional ties we think are to the possessions themselves, but in reality are to the memories the possessions trigger. With the owner’s death, the household of hoarded things loses almost all meaning.

Holofcener went through this when her grandmother died, struggling to figure out “what to hold on to and what to give away. Things that were important to her didn’t have any meaning to me. I [kept] a really beautiful, somewhat broken, very delicate teacup that she had in her cabinet, that I always loved. I have some of her jewelry that I don’t really wear but I like to have. But it did make me examine the value of stuff. And it did absolutely make me throw away my more of my own stuff instead of saving it. What am I saving it for?

“It’s really a denial of our own death that we save this stuff. Because ‘one day…I’m gonna…’ You know what? You’re not. You’re gonna die before you use that thing and someone else is going to have to deal with it.”

The film is about what it means to be a good person, not in heroic circumstances or far away lands, but as we pass through our own families, apartment buildings, and sidewalks. How does one navigate the guilt of having so much when others have so little? How does one deal with mortality?

Nicole Holofcener is perfectly content to not propose any resolution to the problems she raises. “It’s not an intellectual message. It’s an emotional one. I know when I go and see a movie that moves me, I’m a different person. Either for a minute or for the rest of my life. It seeps in. the message about family and opening your heart and doing the best you can and forgiving yourself for not doing great, great things…that would be nice to impart to people, myself included.”