Thus, in this 6 April 2006 interview with Salon, the 46-year-old Holofcener says that McDormand's Jane is so unpleasantly shocked by middle age, "Because when we're kids we think it's going to look much fancier, much shinier, than this." Irony is an aesthetic reaction both to unrealistically high expectations of life, as this comment indicates, and to romanticized art: Holofcener also says that she's "so sick of seeing Hollywood actresses look like dolls" and that in movies she wants "to see women who look normal, and who dress normally." She has to struggle to make costume designers understand; she wants stains on the characters' pants, "Because that's real."

This last comment indicates, however, that even a born ironist like Holofcener may not entirely understand her gift. She puts stains on the characters' pants to make things look worse than we expect "reality" to look in a movie. If she thinks she's just trying to present a realistic view of women's lives, then she must also think that hangmen's nooses just grow from tree limbs. Her artistic approach is to overcompensate for other artists' prettified fantasies, whether she knows it or not. The inflictions she universally visits on the female characters of Lovely and Amazing are too horrible-funny to be real.

It's one thing to take women down from pedestals, which are so limiting anyway (in part because they require women to act as if they were incapable of farting), and another thing to stomp on their faces when they're on the ground. At times, Holofcener appears to dislike her female characters as much as Nora Ephron does, but because her movies, unlike Ephron's, are inexpensive independent productions she's not forced to fake nice about it. In Lovely and Amazing, Holofcener could be seen as Ephron's id, taking vengeance on women.

Herself included--Holofcener is no hypocrite. As she says to Salon, "I'm up there. I'm as repellent as everybody else. But somehow I can forgive myself, because I think, well, I know I'm repellent." But even though Holofcener says in this 2002 interview that she based Lovely and Amazing on her own family (albeit "very loosely"; she filmed many of the scenes in the house she grew up in), her comic imagination is so harsh, especially in that movie (with its gallows-trapdoor of a title), that she doesn't have enough invested in the characters even for irony. If the ironic protagonists' suffering is not deserved (and even the severest critics of female vanity would probably not agree that cosmetic surgery merits even a brush with death), then the movie probably needs a fiercer, tighter, or higher style than Holofcener has yet achieved. It may be the very sneaky-softness of her handling that led people to mistake her attitude in Lovely and Amazing for sympathy.

Holofcener does show a lighter spirit in Friends With Money. As she says to Salon, "As I get older, more mature, I learn to forgive myself my human foibles." Perhaps for that reason, however, the picture never comes together. She has gained in authority as a writer--the movie culminates without a dramatic climax at a charity fundraiser and you can make out an intended design--but apart from McDormand's outbursts, the material isn't memorable.