Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s debut feature, Walking and Talking, is a near-perfect
movie, one of the most accurate observations of female friendship ever
committed to film. Friends with Money,
Holofcener’s latest, continues to showcase her gift for portraying real women
in realistic situations, from the mundane to the thrilling to the mortifying.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt that this time around her words are exiting the
mouths of three women with eight Oscar nominations to their credits.
Clothing designer Jane (Frances McDormand), stay-at-home mom
Franny (Joan Cusack), and screenwriter Christine (Catherine Keener) are close
friends, and all enjoy enviable existences. Housekeeper Olivia (Jennifer
Aniston) is their less successful friend, both monetarily and romantically
speaking. Strangely, Holofcener provides no background clarifying the common
thread that binds these women, a distracting omission in light of the status
difference between Olivia and the others.
Friends with Money basically observes as its subjects weather everyday changes and dish behind
each other’s backs. Despite writing dialogue for a living, Christine and her husband (Jason Isaacs, The
Patriot) have awful communication skills. Jane, who is growing increasingly
angry and unkempt, has a compassionate husband (Simon Burney), but everyone
thinks he’s gay. And though she’s devoid of ambition and often stoned, Olivia
is nonetheless searching for direction and companionship, both of which she
thinks she’s found in lunkheaded fitness trainer Mike (a shockingly good Scott
Caan).
Cusack and Keener (in her third
Holofcener film) are both reliably excellent, but it should come as no surprise
that McDormand is the standout of the cast. As Jane, McDormand captures the
confusing range of emotions attendant to women of a certain age, comfortable in
their own skin yet disappointed that “There’s no more wondering what it’s gonna
be like.” Fortunately, Holofcener’s knack for dead-on lines
like that one make her penchant for darling plot twists and fairy-tale
endings forgivable.
But sooner or later we’ll need to decide whether Aniston
gets to be a movie star. Her entrenched girl-next-door persona hasn’t yet
allowed for big-screen success, though her initial indie foray (2002’s The Good Girl) was appreciated by
everyone but me. As Olivia, Aniston probably delivers her best performance yet,
but it’s far easier to dazzle people whose expectations are low.
When most people
think of art made from found objects, they probably imagine someone
plucking junk from the curb or otherwise recycling unwanted effects and
crafting sculpture from the bits and pieces. But found-object art doesn’t
necessarily consist of things that were lost (remixes, anyone?), and as the
Dryden’s often mindblowing presentation Tampering with the Image will show, there
exists a subgenus of filmmakers who specialize in manipulating the images
and/or sound from a film to create something else entirely.
Virgil Widrich’s Fast
Film is arguably the most accessible short in the Tampering program,
featuring images of iconic performers (Bogart, Connery, Mastroianni, to name a
few) ingeniously cobbled into a relatively commonplace narrative about heroes
and monsters. The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly is the source material for Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, which strips the color
from Sergio Leone’s classic to make the brutality seem even more
base as Eli Wallach is shadowed by tormentors that include sprocket
holes and leaders. And in Alone: Life
Wastes Andy Hardy, Martin Arnold speeds up, slows down, repeats, and
reverses innocent scenes from the famous film series to fashion a surprisingly
erotic Oedipal tragedy.
Robert Ryang’s award-winning Shining recuts scenes from Kubrick’s horror classic into a
side-splitting trailer for a family flick about a struggling writer redeemed by
the love of a little boy. And filmmaker Natalie Frigo will be in attendance for
the Tampering program to present some of her work, including November
22, 1963, in which she plays fast and loose with the Zapruder
footage.
Joseph Cornell is one of the giants of three-dimensional
assemblage, but he also holds a place as a pioneer in Surrealist short film.
For 1936’s Rose Hobart, Cornell takes
random scenes featuring B-movie actress
Hobartfrom a film called East of Borneo, decelerates the film speed from 24 frames per
second to 18, and ditches the soundtrack in favor of island-flavored
pennywhistle. Movement becomes downright hypnotic — the simple removal of a
coat is more of an unveiling — and the result is the immortalization of a
woman that would have been otherwise forgotten. Salvador Dali was reportedly so
jealous of this artistic achievement that he upended the projector at a
screening of Rose Hobart in New York
City, later saying ” I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he
had stolen it.”
Friends with Money (R), directed by Nicole Holofcener, opens
Friday, April 21, at Little Theatres | Tampering
with the Image screens Friday, April 21, at the George Eastman House’s
Dryden Theatre, 8 p.m.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2006.
