Please Give (2010– 90 mins) K. Keener, O. Platt, A. Peet

   Please Give is another one of those little known movies which is really hard to put into one or another category and also hard to flesh out the entire plot. It centers around 2 sets of people who are connected by a 90 year old woman. One set are Cathy (Keener) and Alex (Platt), a couple who own an antique furniture store and live next door to the elderly Andra. They have purchased her apartment so that when she dies they can knock out some walls and make their house bigger and more luxurious. They have a teenage daughter Abby, (S. Steele) who is your typical teen dealing with the world, her skin, and her parents.  The other set of people are a pair of sisters Rebecca (R.Hall) and Mary (A. Peet).  Rebecca is the caring sister, who takes care of her elderly grandmother. She’s a Mammography tech who spends the majority of her time not on herself, but taking care of her grandmother. She has yet to realize there is a great world out there to live in, metaphorically explained by her not ever going to see the beautiful changing leaves upstate.  The other sister Mary, is a bit more self centered and caring only about her skin, and obsessing about her ex-boyfriend and his new lover.

  The film really centers more around the lives of Cathy and Rebecca. Cathy and her husband are glorified Hearse chasers who find the majority of their goods to sell from families of elderly people who have no idea what the items their family members are worth. They just want to get rid of that and generally will take any amount of money, thinking anything is better then what it’s really worth. Here is where Cathy’s real guilt is. She tries to tackle this guilt by giving money to people on the street. She tries to hand out money to everyone she thinks is homeless but she’s blind to how clueless she truly is. She has very little social skills when communicating with people and can’t wrap around the irony of her trying to do good with 5$ is frivolous when taking thousands of dollars advantage of people for their loved ones furniture.

   Rebecca is trying to take care of the one last semblence of am other figure in her life. She has no life of her own and doesn’t know what it is to truely live. She goes thru the routine of work, grandma, and dinner with Mary so much it has made her a zombie of herself. She finds how to live when she gets a man in her life, and you see it instantly in her glow and her dressing. It’s a happy part of the movie for her and we share in the joy she finds in it.

(Minor spoilers to explain my thoughts…. skip to verdict if you want to know if you should see it) Please Give is hard to put a tag on b/c it almost seems like a movie about nothing. We follow these people’s lives, they all have some problems and go about it, and then it’s over. There’s not really any “conflict” here and the only real plot point that brings some in just simply goes away with not a whole lot of resolution. Cathy’s guilt is still there, Alex is still bored with his life,and Mary is still a bitch.Sure Cathy/Alex find that they should pay more attention to Abby and thus their family comes a bit closer together as seen by her getting her new jeans she has been pining over, but everything is still there. The only one who truly has any closure is Rebecca. Just as she breaks from the dependence on taking care of her grandmother, she dies, and thus Rebecca can now live her life for herself. This may be the only happy (or any) closure we truly get. It often seems like we are just watching a snippet of these 2 families lives and that’s all. And that is what is truly the head scratching part of it all.

Verdict—> While I was watching it, it was pretty entertaining, and kept me interested. The only negative I have is it doesn’t contain much closure or a real complete plot. You will finish watching it and think, well what next? What now? Almost an empty like feeling. That said it’s not bad and people who like smaller indy films and the people in this might find it entertaining. Not a top of the line rental but if it’s a weekend night and a lot of other things are gone, grab a blockbuster and this could be a nice standby for movie #2.

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