Friends With Money Review
By David Kempler
With Friends Like These...
Add four hats and you've got four Annie Halls
"Friends With Money" brings together four of the bigger names from the world of current famed American actresses. Three are filthy rich while the fourth is a maid. She's the hottest of the bunch so it's okay. She is Olivia (Jennifer Aniston). Her well to do friends are Jane (Frances McDormand), who has serious anger issues and who may or may not be married to a latent homosexual, Christine (Catherine Keener), who along with her hubby pens screenplays, and Franny (Joan Cusack), who has a thoroughly unremarkable marriage.
The movie meanders through one gossip session after another with all of the possible combinations of women taking place. Olivia is the prime topic of conversation because after all she is single and unsuccessful. In real life, the other women would sell their souls to look like the "poor" maid, but this is a Hollywood movie so that arena of thought is never entered.
Olivia is certainly not a genius. In fact she's a tad slow on the uptake. Watching guys take advantage of her, especially one particularly obnoxious and vile chap, makes one wish they could possibly meet a woman this hot who can be talked into a state of undress with lines that a kindergartener could see through.
Nicole Holofcener wrote and directed "Friends With Money" and it's a harmless film that attempts to create an artsy atmosphere and script and every twenty minutes or so it succeeds. The rest of the time it at least tries, more than can be said for most films.
The problem here is that despite a fairly decent effort the characters remain a bit cardboardy and stiff. We get a thin slice of what might pass for real people in these characters but far from enough to allow us to care one whit about what might happen to any of them.
As you can surely guess, it is Olivia that "truly" finds happiness in the end. The way she does so, and whom she finds it with, is thoroughly unbelievable and in no way relates to any reality usually seen in this dimension. By the time the credits roll you'll be glad that this little exercise has been completed. You'll be no worse for the wear and no better. It did make me wish I had more friends with money, though. They might come in handy from time to time. One might even have been able to save me the ten dollars spent on this very nondescript but non-offensive time in a movie house.
