Nicole Holofcener occupies ambiguous territory. She’s not old but not young, known but not famous. Those who have seen Holofcener’s films routinely name her as a favorite director, but those who haven’t often don’t even know who she is. But Holofcener isn’t esoteric or experimental. She writes and directs romantic comedies with strong, prickly female leads who are not, in the parlance of the moment, “likable,” but the hand with which she furnishes them with foibles is light. Holofcener is interested in her characters as particular people, not as ideological personifications; her style is what the best chick lit hopes to be.
It’s hard to pin down what is so great about Holofcener’s work, but her newest film, “Enough Said,” which opens this weekend, serves, better than any of the others, as a kind of cipher. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva, a divorced mother of a teen-age daughter, who is living in Los Angeles and working as a masseuse. At a swanky garden party, she meets Albert (the late James Gandolfini), and, though she’s initially put off by his weight, she agrees to go on a date, where she finds him funny, charming, and similarly frightened at the prospect of his daughter going off to college. Just as their romance begins to burgeon, Eva takes on a new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), an acclaimed poet with a lovely house and an enviable lack of cellulite. As Eva continues to date Albert, her professional relationship with Marianne turns friendly, and, before she knows it, she is Marianne’s go-to ear for all ex-husband-related complaints. The ex-husband, Eva figures out soon enough, is Albert. Unsure of what to do, Eva settles into a kind of inertia, which, as time goes by, becomes reactive to the point of romantic combustion.
This screwball-meets-Shakespeare plot, which relies on dramatic irony, barely pleasant suspense, and moral cringing, adheres to a more gimmicky, more “Hollywood” construct than Holofcener’s past four films. “Walking and Talking” (1996), “Lovely and Amazing” (2001), “Friends with Money” (2006), and “Please Give” (2010) are smaller. They situate you deep in your seat rather than on its edge. They’re about jealousy, but not the kind that ruins friendships; hurt feelings that don’t stay hurt; divorces that are probably for the best; husbands who cheat on their wives just once, and then regret it deeply. It makes sense that all of Holofcener’s films have been made independently: it’s hard to imagine her pitching such seemingly low-stakes stories. But most people’s lives aren’t very exciting, and it’s usually only idiots and psychopaths who seek out the kinds of extreme experiences that make for cinematic biographies. What Holofcener’s films lack in tension they make up for in the specificity of their realism.
We adore being targeted by art. We love getting nailed. Among those who write for a living, “nailing it” is one of the most succinct and meaningful compliments. Implicit in the idiom is conclusiveness: nailing it shut. The phrase also usually implies a gimlet eye, the ability to articulate the ineffably obvious. As readers, we’ve grown addicted to it. There are Web sites devoted to nailing it (BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog), and there aren’t many Twitter users who don’t at least occasionally indulge the impulse to fall into this mode (“That thing where…” “Ever notice how…”). The desired reaction, as has been codified in online writing, is a blunt and satisfied “THIS.”
But accuracy isn’t always artistry, and, while pangs of recognition can be thrilling—novels set in your Brooklyn neighborhood, a reference to a bottle of Sriracha in the fridge, scenes scored with your favorite indie band—it’s intellectually disingenuous to allow that recognition to masquerade as some higher order of feeling. Owing to the rise in niche media, specificity—of language, of dress, of eating habits—is taking the place of narrative empathy. People love thinking about themselves, and getting someone to like something—or to “like” something—seldom requires much more than giving them the chance to celebrate their own personal history.
The films of Nicole Holofcener, on their surface, appear to traffic in the cheap thrill of recognition. They have the trappings of what counts as contemporary cinematic realism: actors with asymmetrical faces and unpolished, off-kilter dialogue. Her heroines live normal, not particularly aspirational lives. They are clever and wry, but their lines sound improvised, spoken without the dramatic pauses and soothingly predictable pitter-patter of most Hollywood films. Catherine Keener, Holofcener’s friend, muse, and recurring star is beautiful, no doubt, but her teeth are a little weird and her hair can get frizzy. In her movies, Holofcener makes Keener an agent of precise continuity: she has a realistically finite wardrobe and actually eats the groceries she buys.
But Holofcener’s films are more than just collections of accurate props and believable references. It’s the stories Holofcener tells about these characters—her plots—that feel true to life. And coming up with plots like this—plots that nail it—is a different, and greater, achievement than hiring a good location scout and costume designer to help pepper a fictional universe with familiar details.
Believability demands human decency, which is often anathema to dramatic conflict. Holofcener’s films make you realize the extent to which most movies depend upon the kind of pathological mistakes that no sane person would make. Her œuvre is brimming with examples of this believability: nervous breakdowns take the routine form of negligent hygiene and pushy behavior in line at Old Navy; petty theft goes unpunished; a little girl floating face down in a swimming pool is only pretending; a teen-age daughter is kind to her parents only after they buy her a pair of overpriced bluejeans.
The best example of Holofcener’s privileging of plausibility over high-stakes narrative occurs in her first film, “Walking and Talking.” It’s about two best friends, Amelia and Laura, and it is riddled with roads wisely not taken. At one point, while Laura is attending a play put on by the young waiter who flirts with her every morning at the coffee shop, Amelia, upset about a botched date, goes over to Laura’s house only to find that Laura’s fiancé, Frank, is there all alone. He invites her in, and they chat as he folds laundry. Frank offers Amelia pot, and helps her to light the pipe. Watching the scene as a person accustomed to the rules of Hollywood, you get nervous. Nothing good is going to come of this, you think. He’s going to kiss her, she’s going to resist and then succumb. They’ll sleep together, Laura will find out, all will go to hell. But that’s not what happens. Of course that’s not what happens. Because in real life a woman does not sleep with her best friend’s fiancé. Up until this scene, there is no indication that “Walking and Talking” is about amoral people, so why would Amelia suddenly commit the ultimate betrayal? She wouldn’t. There’s a kind of no-duh logic to Holofcener’s storytelling that makes other, supposedly realistic films look like Looney Tunes.
In her 1922 novel “Glimpses of the Moon,” Edith Wharton writes that “the mysterious fact” about “a marriage begun in mutual understanding is [that it’s] too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.” Holofcener seems to understand this sentiment in a way that few other directors do. She believes in the indelibility of true love and true friendship, and she refuses to throw either under the bus for the sake of story. Despite what plot-drunk screenwriters would like to believe, single mistakes seldom ruin relationships.
“Enough Said” is flashier than Holofcener’s previous films, and it’s more eager to pander to our desire for conflict and confrontation. But in spite of its contrived, almost shticky formulation, it’s still realistic in terms of how the characters deal with the unfortunately serendipitous situation they find themselves in. It’s almost like Holofcener’s characters have been transplanted from a charming fixer-upper to a manicured McMansion but have managed to retain their verisimilitude despite their new surroundings. Over and over, Holofcener chooses to nail the way people are—how they feel and talk and react to the stage they’re on—rather than to devote herself merely to the stage itself. She indulges our best instincts, not our worst.
Alice Gregory is a writer living in New York.
Above: Nicole Holofcener at the 2007 première of “Friends with Money.” Photograph by Mario Anzuoni/Reuters.
