Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money

That's what makes Aniston the dent in Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money. She plays Olivia, a former teacher who lost her sense of vocation as the result of a two-month fling with a married man that she can't get over. So she's working as a house cleaner, a job she can perform while smoking pot all day. In one sense, Olivia is too "nice," e.g., she's can't stick to her price when a rich guy haggles over her hourly rate, and when she takes a guy she's dating to work with her she not only can't refuse to give him the cut he insists on, she doesn't stop dating him afterwards. At the same time, however, she's parasitic, amoral: she goes through her client's drawers, in one case using a vibrator that she finds, and she's not above stealing an expensive cosmetic cream that she likes but can't afford.

The movie sets the openly lost singleton Olivia at the low end of a gamut of female friends who are all married and rich (Christine: Catherine Keener), richer (Jane: Frances McDormand), and richest (Franny: Joan Cusack), but not necessarily happy. At the end of the movie, Olivia gets what her friends have, without looking for it or deserving it especially, and this should be some kind of crowning irony, but Aniston gives us so little sense of what Olivia could be that it's hard to know how to react.

There are actresses who could draw you in to the confusions of a woman like Olivia. At least one of them--Catherine Keener--is in the movie; Aniston's Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow and the Laura Dern of Citizen Ruth (1996) are others. By contrast, Aniston just seems genuinely stoned. She's game for playing an unkempt woman who is also morally unattractive, and even for the deadpan irony that doesn't make use of her needlepoint reactions (Olivia isn't centered, or sober, enough for that). But Aniston, an honest hard worker, plays a mess like Olivia about as convincingly as Madonna could play Courtney Love. I'm sure there are many advantages to being a level-headed businesswoman-star, but they tend not to show up onscreen.

At the same time, it's good to see that Holofcener isn't bloodying her nails on her characters here. In her last feature, Lovely and Amazing (2002), a mother goes in for liposuction and nearly dies from complications, while one daughter, a married, unsuccessful doodad sculptress, is arrested for having sex with an underaged boy, and the other, an insecure actress, has her face mauled by a stray dog. Critics bizarrely saw Holofcener as sympathizing with women with "issues"; the irony struck me as much more punitive.

Holofcener is an interesting figure because she globally deromanticizes women's stories in an unusually brisk and direct way. The emblematic Holofcener moment is the one in her first feature Walking and Talking (1996) in which porcelain beauty Anne Heche cuts a fart while trying on a wedding gown. Holofcener's outlook is fundamentally that of the ironist, who exaggerates and distorts to bring out the inner reality that surfaces hide and that people (especially moviegoers) prefer to ignore.