Rent Please Give (2010)
3.4 of 5 from 100 ratings
1h 27min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Kate and Alex (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt) own a successful Manhattan furniture store, reselling mid-century modern treasures purchased from the estates of the newly deceased. Wanting to enlarge and remodel the apartment where they live with their acne-ridden teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), they've bought the unit neighboring their own. But before they can expand their home, they must wait for the current tenant • miserable, 91-year-old Andra (Ann Guilbert), to die. As Kate's family gets to know Andra and the granddaughters who look after her (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet), animosity, infidelity, friendship, and empathy play out with sharp humour and pathos.
- Actors:
- Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Keener, Elise Ivy, Josh Pais, Sarah Steele, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Amanda Peet, Griffin Frazen, Reggie Austin, Scott Cohen, Paul Sparks, Lois Smith, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Harmonica Sunbeam, Amy Wright, Arthur French, Neal Lerner, Mandy Olsen
- Directors:
- Nicole Holofcener
- Writers:
- Nicole Holofcener
- Studio:
- Sony
- Genres:
- Comedy
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Reviews (2) of Please Give
Subtly brilliant - Please Give review by EN
I love Nicole Holofcener's work. This film has her unmistakably subtle, sardonic sense of humour... which isn't for everyone and can easily be missed, I guess, if you are in the wrong frame of mind, or if you like your humour more straight-forwardly served up.
It's 'show not tell', I would say, in that the laughs are not signposted from a mile off, you have to reflect and work out why the situations being shown are hilarious, sometimes painfully so (isn't humour often born out of pain and anguish...). The two main actors, Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt, give suitably subtle, understated performances playing the privileged New York couple who feel guilty about (but still continue to) gain extortionate profits from basically ripping off the recently bereaved (from hoovering up the deceased's furniture and possessions and then re-selling them at rip-off mark-ups in their antique-chic boutique for the moneyed NY style-obsessed elite); this is counter-balanced by their elderly neighbour, a no-nonsense widow full of cranky one-liners and her two adult granddaughters. The plot puts these different people together (no spoilers), with some meditations on redemption, or absence of, and whether it is possible or not. The film is kind to everyone, there are no 'baddies', even the characters of dubious moral character, one is invited to view kindly and un-judgmentally. It's a deeply human movie about quirks and foibles and contradictions, how to navigate morality and narcissism, showing us how, no matter how hilariously difficult life sometimes is, we never stop trying. Subtly brilliant.
0 out of 0 members found this review helpful.
Disappointing - Please Give review by PV
I found this film very diappointing; it's one of the US movies about family life and therapy and how life is a journey and we should all have a group hug etc etc etc - and if you like therapy based stuff and care about characters who live in New York worrying about this and that, then you'd like this.
Some great lines from the old woman character however that makes it all worthwhile - so not a complete waste of atwo hours of my life!
0 out of 3 members found this review helpful.