This Saturday, Rialto Official Selection is screening the latest work from writer/director Nicole Holofcener called Please Give. Not surprisingly, it stars Catherine Keener who has also appeared in all three of Holofcener’s previous feature films; Friends with Money, Lovely and Amazing, and Waking and Talking.
This Saturday, Rialto Official Selection is screening the latest work from writer/director Nicole Holofcener called Please Give. Not surprisingly, it stars Catherine Keener who has also appeared in all three of Holofcener’s previous feature films; Friends with Money, Lovely and Amazing, and Waking and Talking.
Don’t go calling Keener Holofcener’s “muse” though. As she explained to Movieline ahead of Please Give’s Tribeca premiere “I’m not her muse at all. I’m just her sort-of live voice from her imagination….I really don’t think of it as writing inspired by me at all. It’s more kind of her very keen way of looking at things: her open eye all the time. She’s attentive”.
Keener does a great job bringing Holofcener’s character driven, slightly eccentric slices of the real life into being. In Please Give, Keener is suffering from white liberal guilt as Kate, a middle aged mother struggling with being OK with doing OK. Along with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) she buys furniture from deceased estates and resells it in her trendy mid century design shop in New York.
As she attempts to find a way to reconcile her good life with being a good person she tries volunteer work, passes out $20 bills to homeless people, starts buying hideous furniture to make grieving families feel better, and refuses to let her daughter buy an expensive pair of jeans.
That’s not to say she hasn’t given some thought as to how they will renovate their elderly neighbours apartment (which they have already bought) the minute she dies - that’s all planned out.
Keener is a little like Patrician Clarkson (Cairo Time) who I blogged about recently. She’s an incredibly likeable, intelligent actress who built her reputation in independent cinema, and yet has managed to keep her credibility in tact as she moves into the mainstream. Similar to Clarkson, she’s made a career out of supporting roles more so than leading roles (and has two Oscar nominations to show for it for Capote and Being John Malkovich) and has an optimistic view on the situation.
As she told The Guardian in 2009, "Interesting characters are pretty rare if you really want to be the lead. That's the usual complaint of actresses my age, and they're not wrong. They depend on you being beautiful. Since I'm not cast for my physicality, I'm not that interested in those parts. I find that playing so many characters in so many films is a way to stay in the moment.”
And it’s not like she’s running out of work. With four films currently in post production and several films released this year still doing the rounds, it looks like Keener will have no problem finding a way to “stay in the moment”.
Have a quiet chuckle with Keener and Please Give, this Saturday 17th December, 8.30pm.
Watch the trailer and see all screening details HERE.