More than halfway through Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, Kate (Catherine Keener), a moderately well-to-do Manhattanite, passes a homeless man near the posh apartment building where she lives with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) and their teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele). She stops and attempts to give the homeless man a twenty dollar bill; Abby protests, snatching it from her hand. "You never give me twenty dollars," Abby points out. "Give him the five." Kate is appalled, but Abby won't budge. Kate apologizes sadly to the man, and feels guilty. But, frankly, Kate would probably feel guilty either way. She feels guilty a lot.
Kate's compassion has begun to embarrass Abby, and you might see Abby's point -- even if you find her behavior off-putting, even if you feel some Kate-like guilt about it. Keener specializes in playing prickly, sometimes almost predatory women, and here turns that intelligent, rueful dourness both outward and inward: She wants to help, to give, but even considering her options seems to fill her with self-doubt and, yes, more guilt.
Her life in Manhattan affords Kate a lot of avenues for guilt, in fact. She and her husband run a business that involves buying furniture from the families of the deceased, and selling them at often-inflated prices. (If they didn't do it, Alex reasonably offers, someone else would.) They own an apartment, and another one next door, inhabited by the elderly, cranky Andra (Ann Guilbert). The unspoken agreement is that when Andra passes away in the not-far future, Kate, Alex, and Abby will knock down walls and expand. In so many movies, this is a situation that quickly turns into a murderous scheme, but here it leads only to observation.
Andra's granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet) visit her; Rebecca, every day, and Mary - caustic, blunt, unforgiving - less often. Though they live together and don't quite say it aloud, both sisters are lonely. This may sound like an excess of subplots, and I haven't even described several more combinations of these characters that move the story along. But writer-director Holofcener, an expert at talky neuroses, knocks their personalities together with a gentle yet insistent touch. Sometimes her writing style produces a collection of good scenes in search of a movie; Please Give, in its slice-of-life way, feels whole.
A central moment comes when Rebecca, Mary, and Andra join Kate, Alex, and Abby for an awkward birthday dinner (the occasion is Andra's 91st). Abby initially refuses to appear because of a blemish on her teenage face; Mary, a spa worker, speaks her mind about treating Abby's skin and any number of issues, snapping at the helplessly unpleasant Andra and showing genuine (if uncomfortable) interest in Kate and Alex's renovation plans. The multiple shifting relationships in this scene -- the flirtations, sympathy, admiration, and sadness -- is handled with such skill that no single character is allowed to dominate, even as Mary does so much of the talking.
Some of Mary's blasé meanness flirts with being too much. But her uneasy relationship with her sister keeps her behavior grounded in reality. You may notice I refer to the characters more so than the actors; Keener, Peet, and Hall are so strong, so empathetic even at their weakest. They easily inhabit Holofcener's writing, and the distinction between performer and character becomes almost meaningless.
If there's a limit to this generosity, it's most visible with the male characters; the movie has a strange way of pairing its complicated women with vaguely unremarkable guys. Rebecca dates Eugene (Thomas Ian Nicholas), but just barely: we see enough to know that he's a nice guy, self-effacing, short. Obviously he's not really the point, but he barely registers even as a plot device. Even Platt, playing a likable guy gone slightly to seed with his heft (noted by Andra) and untucked shirt, less of a sleaze or a blowhard than in his frequent character work, has a little less room to shine.
I'm also not sure if Please Give ends at precisely the right moment; several of its closing scenes have such subtle beauty that the moment it cuts to black lacks that pulse-quickening perfection by comparison. Maybe it's appropriate, though: Holofcener's characters are primed to live beyond the movie's frame.
