Kate (Catherine Keener) has a lot on her mind. There‘s the ethics problem of buying furniture on the cheap at estate sales and marking it up at her trendy Manhattan store (and how much markup can she get away with?). There‘s the materialism problem of not wanting her teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) to want the expensive things that Kate wants. There‘s the marriage problem of sharing a partnership in parenting, business, and life with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) but sensing doubt nibbling at the foundations. And there‘s Kate‘s free-floating 21st century malaise—the problem of how to live well and be a good person when poverty, homelessness, and sadness are always right outside the door.
Plus, there‘s the neighbors: cranky, elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert) and the two granddaughters who look after her (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet). As Kate, Alex, and Abby interact with the people next door, with each other, and with their New York surroundings, a complex mix of animosity, friendship, deception, guilt, and love plays out with both sharp humor and pathos.
It‘s a good thing that death, guilt, materialism, adultery and acne are such ripe topics for entertainment. “It‘s nice when we can laugh,” says Catherine Keener, “Because there‘s some very heavy material.” In PLEASE GIVE Keener plays Kate, proprietor of a chic New York furniture store, loving wife and mother, and victim of a raging case of liberal guilt and 21st century malaise. While Kate‘s story encompasses the challenging sides of the human condition, writer-director Nicole Holofcener brings affectionate humor to her portrayal of Kate, her family, her neighbors and surroundings.
“Nicole doesn‘t really write villains,” says Amanda Peet, whose character Mary comes closest to villainy as the neighbor who flirts, and then some, with Kate‘s husband. “Everyone has villainous moments and everyone has sublime moments.”
Holofcener is known for subtle, funny, and complex characterizations in films such as Lovely & Amazing (2001) and Friends with Money (2006). Catherine Keener has been Holofcener‘s frequent choice of alter-ego in her films. In PLEASE GIVE, Holofcener says, “Catherine‘s character is in the midst of figuring out what gives her life meaning and what makes her feel good about herself and bad about herself. Catherine can relate to my own contradictions. Our collaboration has grown; I‘m spoiled, because it‘s so easy to direct her—it‘s so easy for her to direct me!” Apart from Keener, though, Holofcener worked with an entirely new cast on PLEASE GIVE.
“I begged Nicole for seven years to put me in a movie,” says Amanda Peet. “I stalked her.”
“Amanda Peet has a great sense of irony about her character and about herself,” says Anthony Bregman, producer, who has also been a frequent collaborator with Holofcener.
About the part of Alex, Kate‘s husband who strays with Peet, Bregman says “Nicole actually wrote the part of Alex with Oliver Platt in mind.”
“He‘s funny and attractive in an unconventional way,” says Holofcener about her leading man. “It‘s one of those intuitive things. He just felt right. He has this hysterical low-ball humor but he also can be dramatic, and he‘s really likeable. That‘s important, because he does this skunky thing.”
Indeed, much of PLEASE GIVE revolves around reconciling the ‘skunky’ things that people do with the good people that they really are—or would like to be. As Platt recounts, Nicole said, “You might know this guy better than me.” He‘s been in a marriage for a long time, and ironically I think it‘s a marriage that works on a lot of levels, and he kinda just does this stupid thing. It‘s all about making it understandable—or deciding that it can‘t be understood. It just happened.”
“The subject matter is at times brutal and difficult to look at,” says Rebecca Hall, who plays Mary‘s younger, softer sister who has devoted herself to caring for their cranky, elderly grandmother. “Nicole gets in there with her sharply focused camera and doesn‘t really let up.”
About Hall, Holofcener says, ?Rebecca has that sweet, open, vulnerable, natural beauty that I think could be overlooked by someone…stupid. Or really not looking carefully. Rebecca plays the ‘plain’ sister to Mary‘s hottie.
Natural beauty also drew Holofcener to Sarah Steele, who plays Abby, Kate and Alex‘s fifteen-year-old daughter (Steele is actually a 21-year-old college student). “I auditioned a lot of teenage girls, but when Sarah walked in, that was it. She literally flushed during the audition, which I loved. She’s very present, a great listener, a very honest actor. She had the right combination of sweet innocence and the ability to be a horrible teenager. And she’s funny, so Abby never seemed too dark or miserable, even when she was. She also happens to have beautiful skin, so clearly she’s a good sport. Most of the people on the crew thought the zits were real and felt so badly for her.”
PLEASE GIVE would be a much bleaker vision without the fundamental humor of the actors chosen by Holofcener. “I also auditioned a lot of Andras,” the sisters‘ cranky grandmother who lives next door to Kate, played by veteran character actor Ann Guilbert. “Again, Ann is a funny woman, and that really lent a lot to the character. Yes, she’s an awful person (not Ann, Andra), but if the actor playing her was humorless, it would have been too heavy. I was pretty worried about finding the right Andra, and Ann exceeded my hopes. She’s hilarious and sad at the same time, a hard thing to pull off. I also think it must have been fairly bittersweet for her to be playing someone so close to death. Or maybe it was just surreal. Either way, she played dead so well it was creepy. She said she had to be dead on stage many times and was an expert.”
“Andra reminds me of a mother-in-law I had who wasn‘t a very likeable person—God bless her rest in peace!” says Guilbert. Unlike Andra, who has a negative word to say about everything, Guilbert speaks warmly of her director: “She‘s very easy to work with. She gives me good direction and tempers my performance in a way I think is right.”
Holofcener cultivates an atmosphere of relaxed creativity on her sets. “Her way of filmmaking is very calm and sensitive and hilarious and nobody stresses,” says Keener. “For somebody who is such a talented writer she is very collaborative,” says Platt. “She understands the idiom, that as you‘re developing a narrative things change. You learn things about the people, and as you‘re working on the scenes you do need to make adjustments. She‘s just fantastic at creating an environment where that happens, and you feel like part of the process.”
“I’m happy when the actors have suggestions,” says Holofcener, “Especially if they’re good ones, which they often are. Low budget movies unfortunately don’t leave enough time to rehearse a lot, but if the script is in good shape, I don’t think a great deal of it is necessary.”
Sarah Steele talks about how character dynamics come together in brief rehearsals of acting pairs. “We had a meeting, just me and Nicole and Catherine, doing the mother-daughter conflict scenes in different ways to understand better: is it that they scream at each other all the time, or is it more passive aggressive?” Says Holofcener, “These sessions are always too short, but very valuable and fun. Lots of laughs and screwing around, that’s why they’re too short, by the time we get down to the serious work it’s over.”
While Holofcener now mostly lives and works in California, she is a native New Yorker; that kinship with the city is vivid in PLEASE GIVE. I know the neighborhoods. I feel like I know where the characters would grow up and what streets they would live on. It‘s nice to feel so comfortable with a city. Kate and Alex‘s apartment in PLEASE GIVE is actually the apartment that inspired the story. Holofcener‘s friend bought the apartment next door, occupied by an elderly woman, and became close to the neighbor. Holofcener used their shared hallway and an apartment in the same building as principal shooting locations.
“One of the challenges of the film is that we were shooting in the 104-degree heat,” says producer Bregman. “It‘s supposed to take place in the fall in New York –autumn leaves are an extended motif throughout the film. And it was incredibly hot. For some reason these actors were blessed with sweat glands that don‘t show as much on them as they do on us.”
Despite the heat, ?The people I work with are talented and they really get me and support me and know me very well, says Holofcener.
She hopes that viewers of PLEASE GIVE share that commonality. ?I guess it‘s more interesting to me if a person comes out of the movie feeling all the things that the movie has stirred up in them. Not to think: ?Hey, y‘know, I‘m a bad person! Or ?Hey, that‘s just like me – it should be a more emotionally felt experience. If I had to sum it up into a sentence I probably couldn‘t. Which is a good thing.
Please Give (2010)
Directed by: Nicole Holofcener
Starring by: Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Ann Guilbert, Sarah Steele, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Elise Ivy, Josh Pais, Elizabeth Keener, Scott Cohen, Lois Smith, Amy Wright
Screenplay by: Nicole Holofcener
Production Design by: Mark White
Cinematography by: Yaron Orbach
Film Editing by: Robert Frazen
Costume Design by: Ane Crabtree
Set Decoration by: Kim Chapman, Kris Moran
Art Direction by: Lauren Fitzsimmons
Music by: Tim LeFebvre, Marcelo Zarvos
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and brief violent content.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: April 30, 2010