Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Amigos, April 7, 2006
Contrary to what the previews and trailers would lead you to believe, Nicole Holofcener's third film "Friends with Money" is not a belly laugh riot. In fact, though much of its concerns are humorous, it deals with very serious topics much like those that she dealt with in her previous film "Lovely and Amazing" .
Once again we are in West Los Angeles among the upwardly mobile with money, Nannies, Housekeepers and men that tend to lawns and pools.
Holofcener, like her East coast counterpart Woody Allen, is part of the scene on which she chooses to comment: she is not an interloper, she is one of them. Holofcener lives and works on the Westside of Los Angeles but she's enough of an artist to step back and objectively survey, comment and analyze all that she sees.
"Friends with Money's" is mainly an Olivia (Jennifer Anniston) concern as she is the house cleaner with friends mostly married and mostly upscale. Jane (a complex and pissed off Frances McDormand), Christine (as a usually conflicted and badly married Catherine Keener) and Franny (a warm hearted Joan Cusack) who are all rich and concerned about Olivia: eager to have her settled down so that they can go on with their lives. All three are alternately self-absorbed, and oblivious to the world around them yet love Olivia enough to care about what happens to her.
At her most unglamorous , Anniston makes the most of her role as a woman who is at a loss to make a success of her life: she is both emotionally and socially frozen and her only outlet is her friends...in other words she is lucky to have Jane, Franny and Christine...all of whom support her both emotionally and monetarily.
Director Holofcener knows this milieu very well and this transfers to the screen as compassion and understanding. She does not look down on those she chooses to eviscerate. Instead she steps back and reveals the foibles and fancies of a group of people of whom she feels a deep and thorough understanding. "Friends with Money" is a serious, complex and intelligent movie that despite its surface humor is a social and moral comment on par with anything that Woody Allen in his prime has ever committed to film..
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Funny, Insightful Look At Friendship, April 10, 2006
Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) finds her friends, Franny (Joan Cusack), Christine (Catherine Keener) and Jane (Frances McDormand) are moving on without her. Franny stays at home with her two kids, while her husband (Greg Germann) works. Their relationship is good and their biggest decision is where they should make a large donation. Christine and her husband, David (Jason Isaacs) are screenwriters who work together, argue a lot and have decided to put a second floor extension on their house. Jane is a well-known fashion designer who loves her husband Aaron (Simon McBurney), who everyone thinks is gay. Olivia, on the other hand, cleans people's homes, having quit her job as a teacher at an exclusive school because the kids were making fun of her. She has trouble finding her place in life when all around her; everyone seems to be doing much better.
Nicole Holofcener's ("Lovely and Amazing") new film "Friends with Money" has some richly observed moments and some good laughs about adult friendship.
Olivia is Jennifer Aniston's best character since "The Good Girl". Unmotivated, slightly depressed and confused, Olivia clearly doesn't want a lot of pressure or obligation in her life, working as a maid in various people's homes. After she spends her day cleaning for others, she goes home and pines for the man she once loved, a married man who had an affair with her. Franny fixes her up with Mike (Scott Caan), her trainer, and they begin a relationship which doesn't seem to give Olivia a lot of joy.
As we watch Olivia wade through her pot-hazed life, Aniston portrays why this woman would feel this way, giving us a rich portrayal of a woman who doesn't do much. But we get why she would begin a relationship with Mike. We get why she calls her ex-boyfriend every night and hangs up. We understand her feelings of abandonment when she hangs around her once very close friends.
Really, with a supporting cast including Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack how could the film go wrong? Each is great as a very different friend to Olivia. Frances McDormand is the standout as Jane, the fashion designer who just turned 43 and seems to be experiencing a mid-life crisis. But Keener and Cusack are both very good as well. Each has their personal problems and problems with their relationship, but they are unique enough to be different.
There are some truly funny moments, the type of moments Woody Allen used to create for his very similar films. The dates between Olivia (Aniston) and Mike (Caan) are funny, unusual and painful to watch. Jane (McDormand) steals many of the scenes she is in, as she plays a fashion designer who is losing control. Unfortunately, I find myself getting annoyed at many of the same things her character does. I hope I can prevent going off the deep end. I'm getting close, but I hope I can watch stem the tide.
"Friends with Money" depicts a moment in these characters lives. The film is rich with detail, but spends time depicting their actions, their interactions and the results of their friendships. It doesn't move at a fast clip, but because we are watching the relationship unfold, we get the sense we are watching a group of real people. Like we are eavesdropping.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Why don't they just give the money to the poor!", August 30, 2006
When Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) goes out to dinner with her three long-time best friends, Franny (Joan Cusack), Jane (Frances McDormand) and Christine (Catherine Keener), it always seems as though she's a bit of a fish out of water. Olivia is the only one that is single and lacks enough money and financial security to make her life really comfortable.
Her friends sort of know that she is constantly strapped for cash and that she now works as a maid, cleaning the houses of the wealthy Westsiders after she left her career as a schoolteacher because she just "couldn't handle it any more."
In Friends With Money, the wonderful new movie written and directed by Nicole Holofcener not much happens to Olivia but it doesn't matter because she - as well as well as her friends - are so well defined, funny and interesting. Does the amount of money you have really lead to happiness? Although, Olivier's yuppie friends are rich and the quality of their marriages differ, are their situations that different from Olivier's?
While Christine (Keener) and her husband and writing partner David (Jason Isaacs) spar over home renovations, fashion designer Jane (McDormand) has stopped washing her hair and seems to be going through some kind of forties mid-life crisis, wondering whether this is all there is. She spews hate at other drivers and at store managers, but her anger is often aimed at her sexually ambivalent husband Aaron (Simon McBurney) who seems to prefer the company of men to her.
The bourgeois comforts of Christine's career success appear to be breaking apart: is it a coincidence that David's petty insults about her weight gain and the neighbours' chilly reaction to their view-blocking annex escalate at the same time? Christine's tensions contrast with the parental bliss shared by her sympathetically affluent chum Franny (Cusak) and her wealthy husband, Matt (Greg Germann) who are about to donate two million dollars to their kid's school, even though the school probably doesn't need it.
Obviously, they all have money, but these self-obsessed, hard working people certainly have a lot issues to work through. Yet it is Olivia who seems to anchor the group. She's a wonderfully quirky character who goes from cosmetic counter to cosmetic counter in order to collect enough free samples to keep her complexion looking great. And when Franny hooks her up on a date with her luggish personal fitness instructor (Scott Caan) things don't work out exactly as Olivia planned.
The actresses are all phenomenal, the writing is pitch-perfect and the direction is crisp and droll. Poor Olivia - her large-living friends don't quite know what to make of her, or what to do for her. They obviously love her, but are driven to constantly ridicule her lack of ambition and her lack of income. And the fact that she smokes pot and has been carrying on an affair with a married man is a constant source of discomfort for them.
Aniston, especially shines, she's absolutely charming and very likable without dominating the film, which divvies up the goods with great equability among its idiosyncratic and often argumentative characters. Friends With Money is such an "LA" movie, and Holofcener, to her credit, has really managed to capture all the insecurities, petty quirks and foibles of this very upper-middle class Westside set, in all their self-congratulatory and pretentious grandeur. Mike Leonard August 06.
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