“Friends with Money” Asks: Can Jennifer Aniston Act?
by Mark Canavera on April 20, 2006 in Culture
Nicole Holofcener’s new movie “Friends with Money” asks the burning question, “Will Jennifer Aniston seem like a good actress if you surround her with the industry’s best?” Rounding out the quartet of friends around which this movie revolves are Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand, each a great actress in her own way. Despite some interesting character work, however, the movie never quite manages to converge or to elevate Aniston to the status of Serious Actress.
Aniston plays Olivia, who is undergoing a vocation crisis. She has recently quit her job as a high school teacher and spends her days smoking pot, cleaning rich people’s houses, and sleeping with the wrong men. Olivia’s friends worry for her.
The three friends are all rich, married, and in various stages of marital disarray. Keener plays Christine, who co-writes scripts with her brute of a husband. Cusack plays Franny, a housewife who was independently wealthy before she married her husband. (”If you had to work, what would you do?” Olivia asks her in one of the movie’s most insightful lines.) And McDormand plays Jane, a fashion designer whose husband provides one of the movie’s running gags: is he, or isn’t he gay?
“Friends with Money” takes a huge cue from “Sex in the City,” bringing four women together to discuss their hopes, their fears, and their frustrations with men. The characters seem more realistic than any of the “Sex and the City” characters - with deeper physical and emotional wrinkles - and are certainly played with more aplomb. McDormand in particular is a delight to behold, hilariously angry, always on the verge.
Despite the effervescent character work, the movie is sadly lacking in direction. Are these characters on emotional journeys, or are they just self-important? This movie nudges its way into deeper themes - the distribution of wealth, the ways that people who have money try to use it to control those who don’t, and the impact of money on friendship. But Holofcener leaves each of those themes unexplored.
We frequently hear that Hollywood doesn’t have any good parts for women, and Holofcener seems to be on a mission to fill that gap. In this case, she has done so by providing her actresses with the bare bones of interesting characters and then letting them run loose. Given the level of talent at work here, the hands-off approach was an understandable choice.
But the tradeoff is cohesion, and the movie often feels like “Four Actresses in Search of Writer.” I wish that Holofcener, whose previous movie “Lovely and Amazing” positively sparkles with her quirkiness, had made her own voice stronger here rather than letting her actresses carry the movie alone.
As for Aniston, her attempts to show acting legs after “Friends” are admirable, and she has chosen directors and co-stars who theoretically should be helping her to escape her sitcom past. With each mediocre movie, however, that goal seems more elusive, and I fear for the actress in Jennifer Aniston that we will never be able to see her as anything but herself.
Final grade (on the Dean’s recommended grading scale): B+.
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