6-24-10 Movie Review: Please Give

Noncommercials are doing their best for us, with offerings on five of the coming seven days. Tonight, the Tallgrass Al Fresco series offers Idlewild, with Terrence Howard, Cicely Tyson, and guests such as Ben Vereen and Patti LaBelle in a speakeasy story in Prohibition Southland, from 2006, at 8 in the Brickyard, 126 North Rock Island; tomorrow, Friday, Wichita Pride and the Orpheum present The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Orpheum at midnight; Saturday, Tallgrass presents Wichita native Lee Whitman’s feature War Stories, which was shot in Wichita, among other places, with Michael Brenton Gordon, known to Wichita audiences, and his character’s effort to find out what actually happened to his father in the Gulf War; Whitman and some of his cast and crew will be in audience Saturday at 7 in Orpheum. Then Sunday at 2:30, the Murdock at 536 North Broadway shows the Metropolitan Opera production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, subtitled on the big screen, at 2:30; and finally, the League of Women voters discussion series will feature a documentary, Not for Ourselves, about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 6:30 Tuesday in the Downtown Senior Center, 200 South Walnut, one block south of Douglas and one block east of Seneca.

And commercially, we have an interesting companion piece to Andy Garcia’s City Island in another movie about people and their relations to each other in Nicole Holofcenter’s first-rate character movie unfortunately titled Please Give.

That title may be intended to put emphasis on the problems of Catherine Keener, who becomes increasingly generous to homeless strangers but can’t seem to give anybody much of herself. She has no problems with husband Oliver Platt except for a certain carelessness about profits in their used-furniture business; but her daughter, Sarah Steele, is unhappy with her, though it seems to be largely a matter of Steele’s refusal to follow the programme that would help her acne problem, plus her insistence on expensive jeans: none of the characters is particularly loveable or admirable, but everybody is totally human even in the ways they make trouble for themselves. The ninety-year-old lady is comically obnoxious socially, and the beauty, Amanda Peet, is discourteously honest, but both of them are accurate in their unwelcome observations, as most of the characters are, most of the times, as long as they aren’t talking about their own shortcomings. The old lady, Ann Morgan Guilbert, is a burden to her granddaughter, Rebecca Hall, whose dislike of Keener is based on the entirely accurate suspicion that Keener is just waiting for Granny to die so she can get into her apartment, which also bothers Keener herself with a feeling of guilt.

Relations among this little group, which are in one case a tiny little vignettes that illustrate and suggest a lot of characteristics but don’t do much in the way of plot development: they reveal a lot, but there isn’t much change in anybody.

The great thing about Please Give is that every little vignette is utterly real; I believed in these people to the extent that when Please Give ended, I was unhappy; I was still waiting for a customary plot development, but would have been happy to keep waiting and watching for another hour.