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 is a San Francisco-based writer.

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