Rich white chicks-and the friends who love them.
"Is not married; is a pothead; is a maid." Thus Jane (Frances McDormand) pithily describes Olivia, the odd woman out in a quartet of female friends with, that's right, money. In addition to wealth, they also have careers,
children, homes,
***image1***
husbands and fitness routines-whereas Olivia (Jennifer Aniston, finally handing in her most natural, convincing work since
The Good Girl
) has only an obsessive interest in a married man, a beat-up Honda and insufficient cash to buy moisturizing cream; her daily workout consists of scrubbing other people's toilets and going furtively through their dresser drawers. But in the latest from writer-director Nicole Holofcener (
Lovely & Amazing
), the life lesson isn't how to obtain filthy lucre but to accept yourself for who you are while at the same time accepting your friends for being...something completely different and possibly offensive. Like, well,
rich
.
Like Franny (Joan Cusack) and her eye-poppingly flush husband. They're unsure what to do with that spare $2 million they have kicking around; nonetheless, Franny won't help Olivia when she asks for $1,800 to take a course to become a fitness trainer. "You don't like to exercise," Franny points out, to which Olivia responds defensively, "Do accountants have to like numbers? Do nannies have to like children?" Or like screenwriter Christine (Catherine Keener) and her husband, adding a second story to their house despite the fact that they're increasingly antagonistic in the midst of all their glossy modern decor. And then there's Jane (a delightfully zesty McDormand), inexplicably enraged at the world around her despite her perfect husband-except that everyone thinks he's gay, including the hot young guy he meets at a cashmere sweater sale.
Friends
, like the sitcom to which its title subversively refers, could deteriorate into an extra-long TV episode but for two things: the trained instincts and impeccable timing of its actresses; and Holofcener's metonymy when it comes to less-is-more storytelling.
***image2***
We don't need two-and-a-half hours of movie to spot the characters' weaknesses and strengths, any more than Jane Austen needs a thousand pages to put across the concept of the Bennet sisters. Aniston's character bums samples of Lâncome from snooty department-store clerks, so deftly that we groan in comprehension. When Jane stops washing her hair, we don't have to be Murray Gell-Mann to know what her abrupt apathy means. There's an elegant compression in the script's loving detailing of the way friends grow apart while still needing each other-that backhanded gift of relationship once described by Robert Frost: "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
