[影片]Friends with Money

[Jun]

Dr. Tiffany is right when she said Roger Ebert was completely wrong about this movie.

I think I kind of get it, although I'm not entirely sure. The reason why this movie was not as well received as Nicole Holofcener's previous 2 movies, of which I only saw Lovely and Amazing, is that this one relentlessly defy expectations. Holofcener insisted that this movie takes the audience's expectations and turns it upside down. Moreover, Lovely and Amazing has a warmth, a sympathy for the characters that gives us viewers a patch of solid ground to stand on, but not Friends with Money.

No, Friends with Money, at its heart, is misanthropic and grim. It is ruthless and scathing, and its keen observation and piercing insight only make it all the darker. There is little warmth for every character in it -- perhaps a shred of pity, but almost no sympathy. Perhaps this is why the audience find it so disconcerting that their gut feeling just can't quite embrace it.

Oh but how sharp and ruthless it is. And how real.

Jennifer Anniston plays the only poor one, Olivia among 4 women who are friends. She's a loser of the bunch -- single, broke, "a pot-head" and a maid. But the other 3 are not uniformly with money. Joan Cusack's Franny and her husband are the richest bunch -- they bought a $1000 table at a fundraising event and invited the others. Francis McDormatt plays a famous fashion designer, Jane, who is going through a midlife crisis leading toward major depression. She has stopped washing her hair, and her husband is perfect, devoted, and possibly gay. Catherine Keener's character Christine is writing a screenplay with her husband. Anyone with eyes can tell their marriage are teetering on a cliff. The latter two are merely middle-class, and they are as bitter and secretly resentful of the rich Cusack couple as Anniston is about the lot of them.

One might think, upon the initial revelation of everyone's less-than-perfect life, that this is a story out to prove that money doesn't make a person happy and to show us how poverty strengthens one's character. Ha!

But then it is neither the opposite that tries to prove money indeed makes one happy. In fact, I'd say money plays a shockingly small but significant role in these people's lives.

Let me start with the rich couple, since Tiffany seems to think they are the happiest. Look how Joan Cusack is oblivious to everyone's problems around her --- She is known as the one who shrugs off everything. Nothing sticks to her. She hooks up her personal trainer, a total dick, with her friend Jennifer Annisten. Observe how she talks about her friends with her husband in their privacy. They are both judgmental and condescending toward the others, but in her there is a hint of both contempt and motherly feeling. Note that she is the one who most frequently blames Olivia's flaws and laziness for her financial status. How common.

They are the richest couple among them, but we see her complain over the cost of their kids' shoes and refuses to lend Anniston $1800 when she came begging. She and Christine (Keener) share a kind of oblivion toward others that I have seen sometimes in rich and idle housewives around Bethesda. But I have to give it to them -- the couple seem perfectly content with each other for they are the same kind of people. Holofcener deliberately avoids pointing out any obvious cracks in their lives like she does with the other 3 women. Interesting. I think she wants to steer clear of any suspicion that she might be too cliched -- the cliche that says "Rich people have problems too." She kept her pen away from this couple and rarely direct the lense toward them for too long.

Christine and her husband are on the verge of divorce; they are a textbook example of unsalvageable marriage because there is nothing left between them except contempt and distain for each other. No respect left. Although she is still struggling for his attention, albeit through fights, his cold indifference slips farther from her like a dying fish between your fingers. It makes one wonder what the marriage was like before -- a handsome couple who wrote screenplays together, perhaps the envy of all their friends. When and how did it turn into the bitter monstrosity that resembles their extending house? A psychologist Gottman had developed a system of predicting whether a marriage would fail with astounding accuracy by observing how couples fight. This couple seems to be a illustration of Gottman's system.

At first, I was expecting some kind of virtuous, deep torment that Olivia is suffering to explain her dysfunction: perhaps some complex suffering in the hands of her previous affair with the married man or something noble and profound (like childhood abuse?). But no. It took me a while to realize that she is as shallow and oblivious as the others. She is not necessarily dirt-poor, but she's no virtuous Cinderella either. Observe how she caves in every time a man pushes her further: First when her client bargains with her on her hourly wage, then the brief moments of her clinging to the previous affair. Most revealing is her "fling" with the personal trainer arranged by her rich friend. The maid dress. The sex scene. Holofcener was ruthless in revealing Olivia's pathology and seems to imply that she indeed deserves a miserable loser life. She is at her most hardened and almost sadistic -- none of that glorified, idealized poverty that we are conditioned to see. However, she does not give us the audience anything to morally side with the richer friends either. Except for Jane who apparently became successful more or less on her own talent and hard work, the other two women gave us no indication that they somehow deserved their wealth, rather than merely being lucky.

In the first 15 to 20 minutes, I wondered like everyone else why Olivia remains friends with the other women who do not much hide their pity for her. But things soon became clear and entirely believable. I myself have tolerated with a smile the condescension and barely concealed pity of oblivious friends in social occasions where I was the only single person -- all the other couples, including a pair of gay men. But indeed friendship is not only possible but welcome despite such gaps. Olivia is not the kind of sensitive, self-conscious, self-pitying type. Like everyone else she is oblivious to her own pathetic shortcomings. Observe how several people talk together about others behind their back. It is a movie about self-awareness or the lack thereof.

The ending Holofcener assigns to Olivia is, in my opinion, possibly the bleakest of the four women. In fact, I thought the ending with Olivia and her new boyfriend was analogous to the horror movie routine: Just when you think everything has worked out and will be fine, the monster suddenly sprints up again from his death to scare you.

By the end of the movie, Jane and Franny both seem to be content in their marriage and will go on in the same way as they have always done. Christine, the divorced one, seems to have the most hopeful outlook. Olivia's future looks deceptively rosy as she finds a boyfriend who seems to have so much in common with her in personality and aspiration. I would have been a lot more hopeful for her if Holofcener did not throw in the last bit of twist into this relationship. Money. The ending is indeed far more grim than one would expect, which I believe is her attempt at poking fun at (but in a sadistic way) the conventional "Pretty Woman" routine.

Finally, analysis of Jane and Aaron. I think I know why she kept Aaron's sexual orientation ambiguous, but I also think it was the biggest mistake in the whole movie -- the only note that is blaringly wrong in this otherwise disturbingly believable symphony.

I believe Holofcener intentionally tries to mess with the audience's head by showing Aaron as apparently homosexual and a devoted, almost perfect husband. Here I think she went too far with toying with conventional expectations. It may be true that there are men, husbands, who act like Aaron in real life, who seem to be both suspiciously gay and a perfect husband, that gave Holofcener her inspiration. However, she has not been inside their bedrooms. I am convinced that inside their bedroom life for the wife is not like Jane's. Holofcener wants to have her cake and eat it. She insists that the audience be confused and left ambiguous. The effect of her cleverness, however, is disastrous on the overall movie. It is HUGELY distracting and takes away the realistic observation on the other characters. In the commentary track, she admits that the first question at every audience screening was "Is Aaron gay or not?" It is one piece of noise that spins way out of the orbit of this story and almost destroys the rest of the movie. It's unconvincing, arbitrary, and unnecessarily dramatic.

Jane, on the other hand, is real, if you remove the question of her husband's sexual orientation. There are hints that she has always felt insecure about her looks, being perhaps the oldest and least attractive among the 4 women but in a profession that is obsessed with youth and beauty. She might also be the most AWARE of the 4 women. She is too serious, a trait I can identify with, and almost too obsessed with the right and wrong of the ways of the world. This drives her to question the meaning of life and staring at the road into aging.

I've been thinking lately about how stories about women and stories about men are told and how they are fundamentally different. Can you imagine a story about 4 men of such financial disparity? The conflicts and the distance among them would be a lot closer to the surface. The rumbling of resentment would be a lot louder (not that resentment is not present among these women in the movie). I almost think such a story could not be possible among men. Do men of vastly different economical situations remain close friends? I don't know. Cannot think of any examples in life right now. Perhaps that's the wrong questions, for men maintain a different kind of friendship.

Many critics are baffled by the lack of positive and reassuring warmth Holofcener shows toward the characters in this movie. In her previous Lovely and Amazing, she was kinder and more hopeful toward the 3 generations of women in the family. But not here. Ultimately I have to admit that as much as I admire her penetrating insight, the ruthlessness turns me off a little too.

[tiffany]

我觉得他就是看着看着睡着了。我还是不觉得时装设计师的老公是弯人，他有可能不全直有弯倾向，但是他不弯。
我觉得最有意思的是这些朋友里面最有钱的那一对儿显然最happy，夫唱妇随和谐社会的样子。

[风眉]

看这部电影的时候就觉得冷，读完Jun的评论更是从心底里冷出来。

Holofcener还是隐隐地点了一下Joan的问题，Olivia借钱被拒后，发泄地质问Joan，你除了关心你的家庭，你还关心什么？Joan反问，你想让我难过吗？（大意）。隐隐反应她生活的空洞和寂寞。她对身边的人漠不关心，或者说她的关心只存在于把别人当谈资的程度，但是又和这些loser 朋友保持关系，也许这让她潜意识地自我感觉良好。

可是突然环顾一下四周，我们身边的朋友不都是这样的吗？有几个人会一力地把陷于泥沼的朋友/亲人拉回来，尤其是当以牺牲自己的重大利益为前提，不一定是金钱，有可能是长期的精力投入。这样一想，竟觉得自己没有立场去指责Joan.

[tiffany]

我觉得joan的反应挺可以理解的啊。olivia管她借钱做trainer，结果她自己跑一迈就要死要活的，显然那点儿钱也就打水漂了，问银行贷款的话还需要证明银行有赚，问朋友借钱只需要证明朋友不会赔，olivia显然证明不了这个。而她跟joan说是你的钱，joan的反应是当然是我们的钱，说明joan这个人重点比较清楚，老公孩子排在朋友上面。----- 我现在真是大妈了。