Friends With Money: TV at the Movies
Friends With Money is wonderful little film that is about conversations in cars, kitchens, restaurants, living rooms, and shops. It is about how money and happiness are not the same and how friendships can transcend class. It is about how open-ended all of our lives are with no one answer or goal that can be reached that would tie it all up in a big pink ribbon. In other words, it’s not a movie, it’s HBO.
It’s no coincidence that writer/director Nicole Holofcener worked on Sex in the City and Six Feet Unter, both hallmark HBO shows. She has the ear for endless, self-aware dialogue that shows a deftness with connecting strands of story, much like a good TV plot. I really don’t mean that in a bad way. TV has been kicking movie’s ass for a while. I’d gladly watch an episode of Lost and 24 than sit through a lot of what passes for films. And certainly a lot better than the crop of films that plunder the endless supply of past hits (Bewitched, Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, The Honeymooners, and soon to be Dallas and Welcome Back Kotter).
And FWM benefits mostly from being like TV in that it is not a chick flick. I know that the film is all about “chicks” and their woes, but there is no sweeping off of feet in front of the Eiffel Tower. When Jennifer Aniston’s character repeated calls a former lover, you expect there to be some kind of reunion and rekindling, but it is not to be. When one of the women’s husbands is reputed to be gay, you expect there to be a momentous coming-out later in the film, but it’s dealt with far more subtlely. The one character that does explode is Frances McDormand’s, who bristles with indignant energy at everything from people cutting in line to waiters who ironically make you wait. You get insight into her character without really needing to see her change in some dramatic way.
And it’s in those characters and the way they meander through their lives that give Friends With Money the feeling of a great pilot for a show that should go on. It does a real service by showing how the relationships help validate each other and give each other meaning. None of the loose ends are tied, and none of them should be because if they were, these people would feel fake. I really don’t like chick flicks or chick TV (see Gilmore Girls - a show Holofcener also worked on), but if they’re going to look like Friends With Money, count me in.
