If American society were remotely honest and self-aware, prepared to grapple with its true taboos and phobias, Nicole Holofcener's third feature, Friends With Money, would not be rated R, "for language, some sexual content, and brief drug use." A more appropriate designation might be NW-175: No wage-earners under $175,000, "for frankly acknowledging that one's perceived value as a human being is often directly proportional to one's annual income." Having taken a keenly observational scalpel to female body issues in her previous film, 2001's Lovely and Amazing, Holofcener now dares to tackle class—not as a conscientious Socialist Brit like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach might do it, pitting ridiculous nouveau-riche twits against stalwart proles, but by focusing on a small group of privileged Angelenos, even the poorest of whom does more than just subsist. Friends With Money is more timid and diffuse than it should have been, especially in the way that it provides a financial deus ex machina for its least solvent character; still, Holofcener deserves some kind of medal for addressing the subject at all.
While we're at it, let's give her another small commendation for making a movie almost exclusively about women in their 40s. (Three of the four female leads have husbands, but the only fella granted his own subplot, Simon McBurney's Aaron, is so blatantly effeminate that everybody he encounters assumes that he's gay.) In roughly descending order of wealth, we have placid, laid-back Franny (Joan Cusack), filthy with enough lucre to be able to donate $2 million to her daughter's school and invite her pals to a charity dinner charging $100K per table; irritable Christine (Holofcener regular Catherine Keener), an accident-prone screenwriter in the process of adding a ghastly, view-obscuring second story to her home; livid Jane (Frances McDormand), forever decked out in her own overpriced designer clothes but so terrified of middle age that she's stopped washing her hair and started throwing juvenile tantrums; and, finally, amorphous Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who recently quit her job as a high-school teacher after growing weary of being taunted by her richer students and now works as a maid.
Obviously, Aniston is a good decade younger than her costars (as well as, ironically, about a gazillion times richer than the three of them put together), and it's probably to Holofcener's credit that she doesn't feel the need to explain that discrepancy within the narrative. Extratextually, one could speculate that Aniston was meant to provide a little marquee oomph, but it's at least equally plausible that Olivia is in her 30s simply because the sight of a 45-year-old woman with no partner, no money, no ambition and no prospects would be too pathetic to bear. As it is, Olivia is so passive and pliable as to be completely mesmerizing, if also maddening. Fixed up by Franny with a lunkheaded personal trainer (Scott Caan), Olivia lets him tag along to one of her cleaning jobs, presses a sponge into his hand by way of clumsy flirtation, and then stands there with jaw agape, as you or I would, when the dolt demands a cut of her fee. ("After all, I helped.") Unlike you or I, however, she doesn't haul off and belt him, or tell him to go screw himself. She hands him $40, and they continue to date.
It's not clear to me whether Holofcener means to suggest that you can't have any degree of personal autonomy without a decent income, or the inverse—that Olivia has no money precisely because she's a walking, pot-smoking doormat. Likewise, is it mere coincidence that Franny and her husband (Greg Germann), the couple with the fattest bank account, also have the happiest marriage and the most sex? Holofcener avoids drawing facile conclusions, but her movie endlessly circles its ostensible subject without achieving any real insight; she seems content with the medal she deserves for paying it lip service, and keeps wandering off on funny but irrelevant digressions, such as Aaron's adventures in the land of the metrosexuals. Friends With Money has a couple big ideas and a great many small observations—if only the latter had anything to do with the former. Also, Keener and McDormand both specialize in tart-tongued head cases, and the two of them together is just a little too much brittle neurosis for one movie, especially when offset by Aniston's bovine stupor. You could easily leave the theater believing that money is the root of all whining.