Some of Our Best Friends Are Filthy Rich

SCOTT FOUNDAS: I'm glad we're starting off this blog on the 2006 Sundance Film Festival by giving a tag-team report about the opening night film, Friends with Money. It seems particularly fitting in that two of the characters in the movie are a husband-and-wife screenwriting team (played by Catherine Keener and Jason Isaacs), who sit opposite each other in their office and shout prospective lines of dialogue back and forth across the room. I'd like for people out there in cyberspace to imagine that this is how we're working together right now.

ELLA TAYLOR: And don't think I didn't record every one of your loud guffaws, Scott Foundas, even though you claimed at the end that you only liked it "here and there."

FOUNDAS: True. But before we go any further, we should probably say that this is a movie about a quartet of lifelong female friends and their significant others (or lack thereof) who navigate the perilous (if refreshingly racism-free) terrain that is life in Los Angeles. There're the aforementioned screenwriters; a high-end fashion designer (Frances McDormand) with an effeminate husband (Simon McBurney) who everyone assumes is gay; the privately wealthy Franny (Joan Cusack) and Matt (Greg Germann); and the slacker/pothead Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who's recently quit her teaching job, taken to cleaning houses for a living and who pines for the married man with whom she once had a 2-month fling. The writer-director of the film, Nicole Holofcener, who made Walking and Talking and Lovely & Amazing (and who clearly has a thing for three-word titles), writes very funny dialogue and she made me laugh a lot — particularly in one scene where McDormand has a histrionic meltdown after someone cuts in front of her in line in an Old Navy store. And as in Holofcener's previous films, a lot of those funny moments are rooted in a kind of painful truth — in this case, the idea that you can be fabulously rich and still utterly miserable (as Keener and Isaacs are), or realize (as McDormand does) that you've arrived at that place in life where life has very few surprises left to reveal. But for every moment like those in Friends with Money, there were at least two others that felt overwrought and false.

TAYLOR: I do agree that Friends with Money doesn't pack quite the punch that Lovely and Amazing did; it seems more underdeveloped conceptually. However, I suspect there may be a gender thing going on in our disagreement. For starters, it would have been so easy for Holofcener to have confined this movie to a breezy farce (at which she excels) about the empty pretensions of L.A. West Siders and tie it all up with a shiny pink bow at the end. Instead, she has tempered the satirical one-liners with a wistful elegy to the loose inconclusiveness of life, I assume not only in Santa Monica. Frances McDormand has wicked comic timing, and Jennifer Aniston is awfully good at playing lost women who drift through life letting other people trample on them — up to a point. And I liked that the strategically ambiguous "gay" husband adores his wife and wants more children. The movie has a nice fluid feel, and Holofcener has a fine way with rhythm and pace. Her world view, such as it is, is built into the material and psychic insufficiency of these people's lives, rather than declaimed from the rafters.

FOUNDAS: I too was relieved that Holofcener didn't feel the compulsion to tie all her loose ends up into a neat package — a welcome departure, I must say, from last year's opening night film, Happy Endings, in which every storyline was predicated on such lugubrious coincidences and chance encounters that I wanted to run screaming from the theater. Friends with Money certainly isn't a bad movie, but when its brisk 88 minutes were up, I felt unsatisfied. The promise that this might be a movie about the ways in which people's financial status affects their interpersonal relationships is certainly left unfulfilled. But even taken strictly as a character study, I wanted to know more about these people, particularly about Aniston's Olivia, who I think really gets the shaft. We never learn why she's so unmotivated in life, or why she's so hung up on an ex-boyfriend who (in his one fleeting appearance) seems to be a total jerk. That's not to suggest that Holofcener owes us some Freudian hypothesis about Olivia's unloved childhood — that kind of armchair psychoanalyzing is too rampant in movies to begin with — but merely that we have to believe in a character's existence before we can become emotionally involved in his or her life, and I for one never felt Olivia was anything more than notes for a character still waiting to take full-bodied form in Holofcener's mind. But at the risk of not having anything left to say about the movie when it opens later this year, I'll break off here by saying that it was certainly an odd sensation to spend the entire morning traveling from Los Angeles to Park City, only to watch a movie filmed in highly recognizable, sun-drenched Santa Monica and West L.A. locales, all the while snow was pouring down in buckets outside. There are more than 100 new feature films and nearly as many shorts screening in Sundance this year, so I hope, as we venture out for our first full day of screenings, we may look forward to going places other than our own backyard.

TAYLOR: Oh come now, Squire, only a guy could fail to understand why it is that so many of us women stay fixated on total jerks long past the sell-by date. And most Hollywood movies are so psychologically over-explanatory these days that I appreciated Holofcener's steadfast refusal to explain her characters away. I was satisfied that we entered without preamble in the middle of these people's vaguely unsatisfactory lives, and satisfied to leave most of them not much the wiser. That's the statement, isn't it? I mean, not to mix apples and oranges, but you wouldn't dismiss Chekhov for the same thing, would you now? Anyway, we can agree that this movie isn't weighty enough for us to whine on forever about it. Friends with Money was an intelligently crowd-pleasing way to ease into the Sundance Film Festival, which was good enough for me. And so to dinner...

FOUNDAS: Me, I'll take Chekhov's Sisters over these Friends any day of the week.

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