Kate (Catherine Keener) is a mother and wife who owns a furniture store with her husband Alex(Oliver Platt).The way they acquire their stock and how to price is always niggles at Kate’s conscious and beliefs on ethics. Their teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) always wants the expensive things and Kate is determined to make her daughter appreciative and grounded.
Kate is determined to make the world a better place but her marriage, childrearing and business worries her immensely. She gives a lot to charity, the homeless and tries to cheer people up especially her neighbor but always feels like she is not doing enough.
Kate’s elderly neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) is frail and very very unfriendly. Andra has 2 granddaughters that have different outlooks on life and what they want with regards to their grandmother does not make life easy for her. Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet) beliefs about their grandmother creates a little animosity between them that they don’t get along that well. Their own personal struggles with romantic relationships also widens their differences.
As the press release summarized the movie beautifully as “As Kate, Alex, and Abby interact with the people next door, with each other, and with their New York surroundings, a complex mix of animosity, friendship, deception, guilt, and love plays out with both sharp humor and pathos. PLEASE GIVE is writer/director Nicole Holofcener's perceptive—and devastatingly funny—take on modern life's contradictions, good intentions and shaky moral bearings.”
This movie left me feeling like it should have gone straight to TV or an art movie cinema. I will give it 3 Segs Stars… Simply because I shed a couple of tears and the ending and story was not predictable AT ALL
The movie starts showing at Ster-Kinekor Theaters on the 13 august 2010
website: www.sonyclassics.com/pleasegive/
Censorship: 13NS
Movie length: 100 minutes
IMDB Score: 7.4/10
Genre: Comedy Drama