Women with Money

By Sheerly Avni, Truthdig. Posted April 11, 2006.

Female actresses complain frequently about the lack of interesting roles for women on the big screen. They should try being a female audience member.

Over the years, my friends and I have developed a game along the lines of a feminist version of Where's Waldo: Whenever we leave a theater particularly disgusted by the bimbos, princesses or, worse, "empowering" models thrust onscreen for our popcorn-tossing pleasure, we comb through every movie we can remember, looking for one -- just one -- recent film sporting a female character who bore any relation, in her preoccupations, demeanor and full-bloodedness, to anyone we knew.

Thankfully, we could count on Nicole Holofcener's movies -- all two of them. First there was "Walking and Talking" (1996) -- the story of two young women whose friendship begins to fall apart when one announces her engagement. Five years later came "Lovely & Amazing" (2001), a film about a few weeks in the lives of three sisters whose mother has gone for plastic surgery.

Both movies, carefully detailed and character driven, tell small, sharply-drawn stories about a specific sliver of upper-middle-class urban life. Men do figure in Holofcener's world, but not as the villains, heroes or Prince Charmings of standard chick flicks. It's the relationships between the women -- mothers, daughters, sisters, friends -- which drive her plots forward. The men matter, of course, as part -- but only part -- of what these women need in their lives.

Her newest film, "Friends With Money," is an ensemble comedy starring Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack as three rich married women who fret and worry about their one pitiably broke friend (Jennifer Aniston, reprising her subdued performance in the indie hit "The Good Girl"). Aniston plays Olivia, a perpetually stoned former high school teacher who has quit her job and now cleans houses for a living. When the women fret and sigh over Olivia's aimlessness and miserable taste in men, they're dissecting the marriage of whoever happens not to be in the room at the time, their concern part affection, part condescension.

The movie reads like a kinder, gentler "Husbands and Wives," and indeed Holofcener is frequently compared to Woody Allen. The two directors share a keen eye for their characters' frailties and hypocrisies, but while Allen's protagonists start off lost and tend to stay there, starving on an emotional diet of imagined eggs, Holofcener likes to throw her characters a bone every now and then. In "Friends With Money," for example, even the raging and bitterly menopausal Jane (McDormand, at her acerbic best) gets a much needed love scene with her possibly gay husband. As for Olivia and what she gets, well, no need for spoilers.

On the evening we meet to talk about the new movie, Holofcener looks like she could be one of her own characters: slim, casually dressed, wearing a black blazer and blue jeans -- not $600 designer blue jeans, but honest-to-God Wranglers -- and no makeup. Though she lives in Los Angeles, the only L.A. thing about her is her long, wavy dark hair. Highlighted, layered and shiny, it's hair as weapon, or hair as prop -- the kind of prop that a woman of a certain vanity will unconsciously toss, shake and flip back and forth.

Holofcener is not that kind of woman. She neither preens nor poses, instead sitting attentively still, leaning in across the restaurant's table and squinting a bit when thinking hard about a question. Until the arrival of her salmon ("Grilled, please, all the way through, nothing seared about it"), she keeps both hands clasped in front of her, brown eyes intent as she politely, cheerfully and with just a hint of impatience lets me know on several occasions that she thinks I'm totally full of shit.

Sheerly Avni: What do you think of the term "chick flick?"

Nicole Holofcener: Ugh, don't you hate that term? It's derogatory, it's stupid, it's so irritating. On the other hand, I don't really care. Isn't life just too short to get all worked up about stuff like that? Maybe if I didn't get to make my movies, I'd say, "I'm so sick of this goddamn chicklit shit, this is not a chick flick, it's just a movie about a woman."

And all that is true. But I'm not that upset about being labeled anything, because I do get to make my movies. And if people are talking about my movies at all, then that's good.

SA: Would you see these films as feminist, or political?

NH: Gosh, to me it just seems like I'm really self-involved. I write about what I go through, what my friends go through, what I find interesting, what movies I go see -- isn't that sort of narcissistic?
Can you really be narcissistic and political at the same time?

SA: Was this movie also based on your own life?

NH: I've always been a person who wanted to break the money taboo. If I told people what I made, I would see the looks on their faces. The discomfort -- "Oh are we going there? Are we going to have to talk about that? Am I going to have to divulge what I make?" I'm so sick of this privacy thing about salaries, even though my girlfriends talk about every detail of our lives, down to - well, God knows. Everything.

SA: Like Frances McDormand's character, talking to her husband about her friends' bad marriage: "Do you know she's never even seen his asshole?"

NH: Yes, we can confess our deepest secrets, the most private things in our lives, and when we are asked what do you get paid for that, we freeze up.

I just don't want to feel ashamed of what I'm making, whether it's too little or too much. If it's too little, you're being degraded, and people say "hey you should be making more." If it's too much, you're "inflated" and it's obscene what you're making, and you feel ashamed.
But I feel like money should be a part of my intimate conversations with people that I know well. It's money -- it's a huge part of everybody's lives.

SA: There is a book out right now called "Money, a Memoir," by Liz Perle, which talks about exactly this. How for women, money is still a taboo subject, and this keeps them from figuring out how to manage their money well.

NH: As I reach this age it becomes even more talked about -- and not talked about. Can you pay for private school, do you choose to pay for private school, blah blah blah. I have a friend who won't pay for private school, but she will spend a helluva lot of money on clothes.  [Sneers a bit for dramatic effect.] She'll spend that much money on clothes, but not on education?

Who are we to judge how other people spend their money? But we do it anyway.  We love to judge.

SA: Right, and Olivia [Aniston's character] is in the position where her friends all feel sorry for her. She's a bit younger than they are, her life is unsettled. We hear over and over from the other women what a head case she is, and how worried they are, but my sense was that they were jealous of her too.

NH: Really, how?

SA: Well, the others' lives are set in some ways. Children, houses. Olivia still has freedom.

NH:You feel that way?

SA: Sure. Unlike the other women, she still has a lot more choices than they do.

NH: I don't feel that way. I feel like they wouldn't trade everything to be in Olivia's shoes.

Think. For a woman to be 35, or 36, and have no money, and no boyfriend, and all your past boyfriends are louts … your friends are going to be worried about you! I mean, you know her eggs are diminishing…

On the other hand, though, I think they are also judgmental, and I think that we are judgmental by nature. We all think we know what's going on with other people…We can say, like in the movie, "Oh, that woman's husband is gay" but will we look at our own marriage?

SA: The happiest couple in the movie is also the richest. Not very PC.

NH: No, right? I guess I just think that life is about luck. This rich couple happens to have the most money. And they also happen to love each other the most. That's just the way it is. It's just kind of fucked - oops, can I say that for your publication?

SA: Oh, yes.

NH: Good. Well then yes, it's fucked. I think money does help. I don't think it can help a bad relationship. But it makes a good relationship better, more able to enjoy their lives together, without financial stress.

SA: So they're just lucky in a way that Aniston's character doesn't seem to be, at least at first.

NH: There's always that theory that when you're single "you're not ready, you just don't love yourself enough yet." Sure, all that hokey-pokey stuff, that airy fairy stuff, might be true. But at the same time, I believe that a lot of things in life are luck and fate, and that there's less poetry to it than we all want to think.

SA: You say your movies come from your own life. Have you had friendships fall apart because of income disparity, because money got in the way?

NH: There's a huge disparity, but it's nothing we can't deal with. We all talk about our goddamn feelings so much that if anyone has a feeling it gets spread around.

SA: You also directed several episodes of "Sex and the City"--from the first season, when it was still good.  But it wasn't particularly realistic.

NH: It's not realistic. Well, no, in its heart it was, the fact that because these women were so incredibly important to each other, that felt real to me. Even though I personally could never dress like that or look like that or talk like that.

SA: Did you really believe that those women could have been friends, as different as they were?

NH: Well, OK, not Samantha [the slutty publicist] or Charlotte [the waspy art dealer], but as a foursome, yes, they held together; they had an energy.

SA: You're one of the only directors I can think of who makes movies that really explore women's friendships.

NH: Friendship is such a huge part of your life, and it can be really dramatic. When I did "Walking and Talking," people kept insisting that the two women in the story were gay. And I kept saying that this has nothing to do with being gay. This is female friendship, and female friendship is loaded.

SA: Your films always center around how women relate to each other. Will your next film do so as well?

NH: I'm not working on another film. I just don't have any ideas yet. Seriously, they come slowly!

I can't blame it on being a woman or saying that I can't get a movie made -- I just haven't liked anything I've written enough to want to make it. And I do other things in between, writing jobs, directing TV shows. And I raise my kids.

[She shrugs, smiles.] You know how time goes by. 

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based writer.

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