In Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money, Jennifer Aniston plays Olivia, a former schoolteacher who is now a freelance housekeeper. Her friends, who all are married and have much more money than Olivia does, often talk about Olivia's single and broke status — one of them describes her as "single, a pothead, and a maid".
Jane, played by the brilliant Frances McDormand, is a designer with "overpriced" clothes who is often bitter and angry — seemingly for no reason — and her husband Aaron, played by Simon McBurney, is the object of much speculation — people think he's gay. Christine, played by Catherine Keener, screenwrites with her husband David (Jason Isaacs) and throughout the course of the movie essentially realizes the two of them simply aren't a match. Joan Cusack's character, Franny is the richest of them all (seemingly through inheritance as she doesn't work) and doesn't really have any problems with her husband (Ally McBeal's Greg Germann) other than the fact that the two of them disagree about him buying their young daughter eighty-five-dollar shoes from France.
Franny sets up Olivia with her personal trainer Mike (Scott Caan) who follows Olivia to her housekeeping jobs and watches her while she cleans, then asks for a cut of the money when she's done despite the fact that he makes sixty-five dollars an hour. We see Jane not being able to deal with growing old, Christine getting fed up with her insensitive husband, Olivia struggling with the humility of her poor status and Franny..well..putting together a fundraiser for sick people.
The movie's best asset is its stellar cast that knows the slightly underdeveloped characters like their best friends and excellently executes the script's room temperature wit to make the story colorful enough to entertain us for eighty-eight minutes. Keener and McDormand add a great dramatic depth to the story toward the end, but where this film leaves you wanting more is in the number of layers to the onion.
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