When a movie opens with a close-up, montage of mammography, set to a song with lyrics by Paranoid Larry, you don't know what you're in for.
Turns out it's a character introduction.
Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is a radiology technician who cares for her grandmother, Andra (Ann Guilbert, cantankerous and hilarious); whose apartment is owned by Kate and Alex (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt), who are basically yuppie death pirates. They own a store with merchandise that they, as Alex cheerfully tells a customer, "buy from the children of dead people."
They are also waiting, none-too-subtly, for Andra to kick the bucket, so they can break through the wall between apartments and create a posh master bedroom.
"They keep looking at me like 'is she dead yet?' Rebecca tells her sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), a shoot-from-the-hip esthetician.
Kate makes a point of passing out money to homeless people, magnanimously (she thinks) asking, "How are you today, Sir?"
Really, what's a guy with no shoes going to say? "I'm just peachy." Right. Liberal guilt makes for wicked comedy.
But while she's passing out fives and tens and at least one twenty, Kate does little to change her own life or to give of herself rather than of her wallet. (And on the subject of that twenty, New Yorkers don't do that. Trust me. We may not be the world's most soft-hearted people, but at least we're honest about it.)
Kate tries, but she's too filled with pity to be tolerable or even helpful. "You need to leave now," an administrator at a center for mentally challenged youth tells Kate when she breaks down in tears watching the kids play basketball. Later, Kate, a well-to-do middle-aged woman, hides in a bathroom stall crying while a girl with Down syndrome calls out to ask if she needs help.
Kate and Alex's daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele, spot on), is 15 with bad acne, which means anyone who was ever a teenage girl has sympathy for her. But Abby also has her brattiness, demanding overpriced jeans and throwing a fit when her mother gives a homeless man more cash than she'll give her daughter. In other words, she's a teenager.
All the characters are layered like this. There's something to like and something to disparage about each of them. And while Nicole Holofcener's latest doesn't prove the saying about good intentions and where they lead, she shows that the best intentions don't exactly pave the path to heaven either.
But don't tell the guilty liberals.