Please give

With directorial credits on TV series like "Gilmore Girls" and "Sex and the City", director Nicole Holofcener has secured her ticket to the big screen. After the dramatic comedy "Friends with Money", Holofcener stays true to the genre with "Please give" and once again impresses with a great cast and clever dialogue.

Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) make a successful living off the suffering of others: they buy up the legacies of the deceased and then resell them in their shop to wealthy New Yorkers for considerably more money. While Alex enjoys the fact that this business idea allows him to live a carefree life, Kate is constantly plagued by feelings of guilt, which she tries to get a handle on through charitable work.

Only on one issue does Kate also have little problem with her ethics: she can hardly wait until her grumpy neighbor, old Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert) finally dies so that she and Alex can finally buy her apartment and thus enlarge their own place. Still, Andra's niece Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is sacrificially caring for the old lady, while her sister Mary (Amanda Peet) is too busy with herself to help care for her grandmother. When the lives of Kate, Alex and Andra and their nieces intersect, the apparent normality of their daily lives is thrown into serious disarray...

"Please give", with its sometimes quite blackly humorous dialogue and wonderful cast, is undoubtedly a compelling contribution to American independent cinema. The always bad-tempered and less than polite Andra is a wonderful character and Mary, convincingly played by Amanda Peet, is a great mix of emotional coldness and self-destructive neurosis.

However, as good as the actors are, as interesting as the characters are drawn and as entertaining as the dialogue is written, the story is ultimately pleasing. The action ripples along without any major climaxes and culminates in a finale that seems a bit trivial. Viewers who like American independent cinema will be well entertained, but the film won't stay in their memory for long. Considering the many nice ideas and the wonderful actors, this is a bitter disappointment. Nevertheless: for a light-hearted cinema evening definitely recommendable!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp