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.
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."
Article comments
1 - Chris Evans
Disagree with you about Aniston. She's an incredibly underrated actress. Yeah, she's no Nicole Kidman--you won't see her playing Virginia Woolf anytime soon, but when she's in the right role she's golden. I thought she was great in Friends With Money as well as in The Good Girl which is one of my favorite films of all time.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Chris. I figured Aniston couldn't have made a zillon dollars per episode on Friends for 10 years w/o picking up a lot of fans. Actually, I like her better than Nicole Kidman, who strikes me as waxy and pose-y. I like Aniston in her range, it just strikes me as a small-screen range. The audience with which I saw Friends With Money clearly responded to McDormand more than to Aniston.
3 - Chris Evans
Lmao! I loved Frances McDormand. She's brill in EVERYTHING.
4 - Alan Dale
Best story about McDormand: early on, when she would get auditions for movie roles that specified the character had a full figure, she would show up with a pair of fake tits in a shopping bag.
5 - Chris Evans
Dude, that's fucking hilarious!
6 - Joan Rivers
I couldn't agree with you more, Aniston has no range. She is more worried about her hair not being perfect than transforming fully into her character. She has never had any kind of acting ability, she should of been a hair dresser instead. She is cute but that's all she has going for her and that is slowly fading.
7 - Alan Dale
Ouch. Well, I like her a bit more than you do, but I certainly don't miss her between movies. And I never understood the appeal of Friends at all. Thanks for that energetic comment.