This is intensely personal.
Friends with Money is the first film I have seen in the theatre since the end of February. Since the janitors’ strike started (and gloriously ended) at the University of Miami, I have thought about nothing but winning this fight and teaching my classes. I have spent more time than in my entire American life hanging out with people whose lives are so different from mine – mainly from the point of view of class. That this should have been my first class-mingling experience is not something I’m either proud or ashamed of. I have learned a long time ago that this society is much more segregated than it believes itself to be, and not only in terms of race. Living in L.A., San Luis Obispo, and Miami has certainly not helped, but the reality I’ve been confronted with over and over again since coming to the US is that you don’t hang out with people of other classes – not easily, that is, and not comfortably. Please forgive me if I generalize an experience which is necessarily very limited. As I said, I have lived only in three cities that are very socially segregated, and I have hung out exclusively (alas) with academics.
Consequently, these last three months have been pretty amazing for me. I have spent so much damn time on the picket line – days and nights churning out Spanish-language conversations I could barely handle, learning about Castro, learning about persecution in Cuba and persecution in the US, sharing cigarettes because it was the only “food†allowed in the strike zone (because of the hunger strike that lasted well over a month, in various forms), going from being “la profesora†to being “la italiana†to being simply Yovana (a new variation on the constant mispronunciation of my name).
So you’ll understand if I tell you that when Simon and I went to the mall to watch Friends with Money, it was shocking and, I’m afraid, rather revolting for us. I’m not judging the people who pour en masse into a city block of cement, plastic trees, and shop windows every weekend, baited by prepackaged entertainment (God knows I do it, too!). I just think how sad it is to live in a world that spends so much damn energy in keeping people in shops and away from real life – and from building meaningful relations with other people. Every time solidarity and community are created, it is done against overwhelming odds.
At first, the movie played exactly into my dispirited feelings. Who cares, I thought, about the bourgeois interactions of these Los Angelinos who are too wealthy for their own good, unable to sustain friendship without gossip, and stuck in unhappy and inescapable lives? Get real, ladies. Get out there. There are Mexican builders in your backyard, Mexican nannies and housecleaners in the rooms down the corridor – talk to them, learn Spanish, do something.
Then I realized (I’m slow) that this was precisely what the movie was about. How the class groove does not allow straying. How if, like Olivia, you stray, your friends will worry about you. If, like Jane, you go ballistic, you become unlikable. This movie is about how we all find ourselves, sooner or later, in lives we didn’t choose, with partners we didn’t choose, with children we didn’t choose, with jobs we didn’t choose, with friends we didn’t choose. It’s bleak at first, until you realize that what Holofcener is proposing is that these inadequate lives, friends, and partners are something – a tenuous and paltry ticket out, or ticket through, but still a ticket.
This is a movie about making do, about surviving in the meaninglessness of middle/upper-class life, not thanks to special inner resources or magic of some kind, but to the scraps of goodness that come attached to the general lousiness we are handed.
Holofcener is magisterial both in her writing (I am thinking about teaching this script) and in her directing. She is unflinching in her refusal of sentimentality and solutions – I couldn’t find a single sentimental touch in the whole film, a single departure from spartan artistic integrity.
These characters are not likeable. They are a bit loserish and a bit petty. But they get up in the morning and get through the day, trying hard to live as decently and with as much dignity as they can. They can live with themselves and each other because they have retained a measure of trust in kindness and love – beat-up kindness, shriveled love, but love and kindness nonetheless.
The scene that best carries the point of the film is the lavish banquet at the end designed to benefit Lou Gehrig Disease research. Joan Cusack, the most luminous of the movie’s characters and (not coincidentally) the one with the most cash, has bought a $10,000 table for herself and her friends. Before dinner starts, she proposes a toast to the fact that none of them has ALS. The others, who we know from previous interactions don’t give a toss about the whole event, hesitate a second, then join in. One could read this as a sort of silver lining moment, along the lines of “Okay, I am miserable about my life, but at least I don’t have ALS.†I don’t think that’s the right reading. They toast for the same reason why they are there: because they have each other, and because it’s the decent thing to do.
I’m a huge fan of Holofcener’s earlier films, but then I read reviews which seemed pleasant but middling, and I thought I’d wait on this… but your review kicks me back into serious interest. This sounds fantastic, and in keeping with the tremendous strengths of her two previous movies. I’ll check it out in the next week or so (time frees up soon) and respond.
I’m there. Maybe Wednesday. Or maybe Reynolds and I can hit a late show on Thursday.
I’m very impressed by Gio’s involvement in the janitor’s strike and happy that they achieved a victory over the university. Gio’s commitment is inspiring. The university—so enlightened, so “open,” so tolerant, yet when a union forms they behave like C. Montgomery Burns. But I would like to trouble the notion that academics as a whole represent a certain “class” that is middle/upper class primarily and hence, out of touch with the class represented by the janitors. First, many of us do not come from the “Professorial classes”–I feel a constant discomfort because of my affiliation with the university and I have seen this class difference play out in conflicts with professors and colleagues. I feel it also plays a role in my inability so far to “break into” the realms of the tenure-track research university. Also, many of us are in a position similar to the janitors–or, in fact, even more tenuous. Adjunct labor and part-time academic work pays poorly, provides no benefits and lacks any kind of security. It’s time for many academics to realize that they are, in fact, the proletariat of the higher education industry. Unfortunately many of these people “identify” with a class to which they do not belong, and hence, they do not see the worth of organization and direct action to improve their circumstances. They desperately pursue the image of the Herr Doktor Professor. The sickness is all over USC.
However, many of them do make the connection between their own roles and the assault on labor in all its forms during the past 25 years. I hope these people will confront the universities directly and hence, make significant change–I fear that my cynical lassitude might make me reluctant to man the barricades with them, though I am happy to provide pithy slogans and to bring pitchers of cosmopolitans to the picket lines. These people are in a good position to make common cause with the likes of the janitors’ union and such,because they experience directly the gap between an institution’s ideology and its reality. For those who have had the scales fall from their eyes, the university is another institution among others, but one more protected from criticism because of the relentlessly idealistic ideology in which it cloaks itself.
The bottom line: all folks in the university are not of the same class, and further, participation in the university at a certain level creates its own class, one comparable in many ways to that of the janitors. Gio’s activity points the way to one kind of solution–active engagement with people you would otherwise neglect or never encounter. Another possibility is the rigorous uncovering of the academy’s own self-image. I wonder if there’s a way to bring the two together–one that doesn’t denigrate itself for not being sufficiently “streetwise” but that overtly tries to make common cause with those who are consider most “outside” of the academy.
what the fuck does this have to do with movies?
well, I don’t know–perhaps the difference between film as consumer product and film as university study is relevant here. Or maybe there are films that provide useful lessons in crossing class lines and learning the kind of lesson Gio learned from direct involvement?
i have been mulling over these very issues for months. as i said in my comment of a few minutes ago to the “cruise avoidance” post (of all things!), i am solidly middle class. it’s not money (god knows). it’s how i feel in relation to the world. i’m not american, but isn’t that at least a way to think about it, though obviously not the only one, michael?
having said this, i need to add that adjuncts *are* (along with other people) the proletariat of the university. i have to make a conscious effort to avoid qualifications every time i need to say in front of tenured or tenure-track colleagues that i am a “faculty member.” and i never refer to myself as a professor in front of my better-positioned colleagues. i invariably hear them snickering behind my back (they are not; i’m paranoid). and the power structure is palpable. i am just not in the same league. i don’t think it’s just me. (when barbara ehrenreich came to talk to the tent city a week before the end of the strike, she specifically mentioned adjunct faculty as a workforce that badly needs unionization).
i cannot however even come close to feel as downtrodden as the janitors (though they make more money that i do, even before the pay raise they got as a consequence of the strike! they also, truth be told, work A LOT harder). the difference in authoritaviness, personal self-worth, access to public discourse, and personal and public influence (on students, on the university itself, on the media, and on the community) is simply too big. hands down.
the uncovering of the university’s business mentality is not something one can do from the inside without taking on some serious personal risk, and i’m not sure it is as effective if done from the outside. hence the need for collective action, and warm bodies in the same rooms, or the same lawns — as when hundreds of us taught classes off campus and then on campus but outside of our classrooms.
i believe the motto for those who want social change should be, in the words of media benjamin, “organize, organize, organize.” many of us are now committed (and inspired) to teach classes focused on social justice and civic protest in the fall and spring. this is when pedagogy becomes collective, hands-on action. you’ve got to have more than one or two people, though. you need to have a movement.
this has nothing at all to do with friends with money, except that i found the movie to be about the (personal, more than social) pitfalls of a classist society in a really interesting and insightful way.
I saw this yesterday and I enjoyed it–and Gio’s comments are, I think, right on. I’m puzzled by the ending, though. Gio, you mention the scene towards the end of the film in which the friends are gathered around the table at the ALS charity event. The toast is given to a group that includes one new-comer–Marty, Olivia’s date and (one can’t help but assume) her newfound life partner who SPOILER: happens to be filthy rich. Emphasis on filthy. Literally filthy: his house which she cleans is a real dump–he doesn’t work, he just loafs. And figuratively: he’s so rich he doesn’t need to work–which is why his house is a dump.
So what do you make of this turn of events? Is it meant to put Olivia–who previously existed on the fringe of the group–back into the center of things? And if so, does this mean that she will bring with it her old sensibilities, only with money? I mean, Marty is essentially her double (there are, by the way, a lot of doubles in this film, Aaron and Aaron, David and Christine–who are, until their marriage falls apart, mirror images of each other, sitting face to face as they write the same script). Like Olivia, Marty has “problems” with people–which, if I understand it, are not problems at all if the norm is set by everyone else in the film. Olivia and Marty, if they do become a couple, will no doubt continue to behave the same way they have throughout the film. Olivia will continue to smoke pot and drift from job to job and from counter to counter in Robinsons-May, and Marty–because of his “problems”–will continue to live as if he cannot afford anything because he has no job and no money. Does the film end with heavy irony? Or does it end as a Victorian novel does, with what Orwell calls “a sort of radiant idleness”? Having spent a third of a semester with the Screwball formula, it’s difficult not to see the former as the more likely. And aren’t we supposed to “like” Marty because he is not Mike? Yes, Gio, the characters are unlikeable. But what about millionaire Marty?
There’s one key moment in the film, when Olivia says to Franny’s housekeeper “Hey, guess what? I’m doing what you’re doing…yeah, I’m a housekeeper.” And nothing. No connection, no recognition. It’s an awkward moment, and Olivia shrugs it off. And I got the impression that Olivia expected something more in return for this gesture.
One of the more interesting couples in the film was Aaron and Aaron. Is this a romantic couple? They are not only relaxed with one another, there’s a feeling that each has been searching for the other for oh so many years. “At last I’ve found you!” The film pushes us as hard as possible into a position from which we can’t help but judge the relationship as homosexual (everyone in the film says Aaron is gay), thereby forcing us, implicitly, to be puzzled as to why no other alternative presents itself. Male closeness has yet to diversify.
But at the same time, their closeness revolves around shared (and very expensive) tastes. In fact, what excuses their relationship, what gives consent to it, are high-end consumer products. No, they are not gay, they just care about their appearance. And, by God, what’s wrong with that? Well, what’s wrong with it is the same thing that’s wrong with the ALS charity event.
If, as Gio suggests, the film knows what it is doing, knows that these characters are unlikebale, that their lives are empty, that they know their lives are empty but they soldier on all the same, then I guess I wish the film had been more like Metropolis. Harder, bleaker, nastier, funnier.
good comment, john.
the film isn’t bleaker and nastier and funnier because that has been done, or maybe it’s the way mainstream culture would try to do it: if you can’t fix it, at least exploit it. make the bubble burst and have fun watching the pus and the blood spurt out.
but i do believe the characters know their lives are empty and soldier on. there is a quiet melancholy to this movie, and no solutions. marty and olivia: a definite no-go. in the last scene, when they are in bed together, she’s as bored and spaced out as she always is. marty is sweet and neurotic, so they click for a bit, but that’s it. he’s not her salvation and she’s not his. aaron and aaron: they are married, they love their wives, they have this sex-less homosexual fling, they soldier on with their lives while getting some sort of extra-marital (literally) satisfaction from their friendship. no development, no solution. there are no good solutions to half-happy, half-unhappy lives any more than there are good solutions to aging and feeling lonely. you just live with these things.
which is why olivia doesn’t go to therapy and the maids don’t click with their white employers and their friends. you don’t solve the class problem with a little bit of smiling and winking. you don’t solve one damn think with a bit of smiling and winking.
i think this film was done from a place of resigned, accepted, come-to-terms-with depression. i’ve read lynne sharon schwartz lately. she’s a good, solid writer. she writes from that same space. i am not sure it’s a place that popular masculine culture (the culture of masculinity) has explored, though i think men and women everywhere spend a lot of time in it (the space). you encounter it all the time in modern and recent literature, by men and by women: ishiguro, schwartz, yehoshua, henry james… i’m just looking at my bookshelf, where only my latest reads reside. poets do a lot of that too, though i’m not as well read in poetry…
but don’t you find, john, that the film does attempt a little bit to portray a diverse male friendship? unfortunately it is only a side-story. but i think it works quite well, no?
the double motif is well-spotted. maybe a commentary on the ultimate, inevitable solipsism of the human condition?
I do think the film portrays a male friendship that is satisfying–immensely so–though I question the grounds on which the friendship is based (though it’s not really a friendship, it’s a chance encounter that extends into a couple of meetings, not much more). The wedding band is what allows Aaron to consent to a conversation, otherwise he would have shrugged Aaron #2 off like all the others. What allows the encounter to proceed is their shared love of the finer things. But I think the film is making it difficult for us to see this (as other characters in the film do) as a case of two men who are denying their homosexual tendencies. We want to understand the relationship differently. But the alternative is this: “they’re not gay, they’re rich.” This is not satisfactory but, if I understand your reading of the film, Gio (which is an excellent one), at least the film forces us to acknowledge a failure of imagination.
I don’t know if I share your reading of the ending. “[T]hey click for a bit but that’s it.” But they slept together for the first time (after a night of sex, we assume). Aren’t they entitled to an awkward morning? Olivia is “bored and spaced out.” But what if this is what Olivia is like every morning (wake-and-bake). Maybe it’s too overwhelming? Anyway, I think it’s possible to see the film giving us a happy ending, Olivia meets someone she can be happy with and lo-and-behold he’s got tons of money. But by the film’s end, are we capable of experiencing this for what it is, a “happy ending”? We can’t, nor can Olivia. It’s as difficult to comprehend as Aaron and Aaron’s relationship.
i don’t think they are friends because they like fine and expensive things. i think they become close because they are attracted to each other. since, however, they are both happy (as happy as anyone gets in this film — or in real life) with their lives and partners, they, at some level of consciousness, and at the point in which we see them) choose to be friends rather than lovers (since the film is very much unresolved we can choose to imagine how their relationship will develop however we like). their friendship is different because they do things women, not men, do together: talk about fashion, go to the movies, and repartee at dinner parties for four. aaron #1 clearly does not want a homosexual relationship, whether he is gay or not. the wedding rings on both aaron #1’s and aaron #2’s fingers reassuringly rule that possibility out. as for the fine and expensive things, people bond over things all the time. it’s hard for individuals to get close to other individuals only on the strength of mutual liking: that tends to feel too close to erotic to be safe. their wives and their liking for beautiful things enable the aarons to enjoy each other.
mind you, this is, like all relationships in this film, a frustrated and only half-happy one. there’s as much pleasure in it as renunciation. and it is deliberately portrayed as tinted by class (the expensive stuff) because, as i suggest, the whole film is about class — the discreet desperation of the bourgeoise.
as for the ending, i’m afraid our respective readings of it are very much colored by our own personalities, states of mind, etc. which is, of course, as it should be.
I’m mulling this one over. Gio I agree with you . . . I think what I liked most about the film was its honesty (albeit a somewhat histrionic honesty) about the difficulties of friendships, marriage, aging, depression/disconnection, identity, desire and comsumerism among wealthy and well-educated, white middle and upper-middle class Los Angelinos. I certainly have (and take) the privilege to lament “my fabulous life” (or at least what happened to it OR, maybe, why it isn’t what I thought it would be). And John I do think the ending is swimming in a pint of heavy irony (at least I hope so). Still, I couldn’t help but feel that Holofcener didn’t entirely get it right. Her latino(a) characters are mere props (as opposed to those men and women with whom you worked at the U of Miami Gio), and Olivia slumming as a housekeeper struck me as problematic on a variety of levels. Her privileged status is never in question . . . that she is a masochist, of course, doesn’t necessarily change the fact that she has plenty of options. She can steal someone’s $75 wrinkle reducer and slather it on her feet and no one will harm or harrass her. I wish I could call it a particularly brave performance by Aniston, but it is basically the same anti-“Friends” performance she’s already given in Office Space and The Good Girl. As for Aaron and Aaron . . . well, the film seems to position (in a more radical and less materialist manner) a brand of feminism that foregrounds the emasculated male as something of a metrosexual ideal. “Real men” (and I’m guessing Christine’s husband David is the target here) are unfeeling losers who keep their emotions to themselves and just don’t understand. Franny and Matt hover above all due to their money (and their wealth is in no way interrogated). Indeed, money, which seems to be central, is pretty much a given; the audience, in classic realist mode, are not asked to think too much about the responsibilities which accompany their privileges. In fact, let’s turn it into a running joke about homeless people, oops, I’m sorry, I meant ALS patients. I did enjoy Francis McDormand’s character a great deal . . . probably because her issues are ambiguously unresolved (is it possible that she is unhappy because she is in a relationship that, while built on a strong and loving foundation, is ultimately a charade and how might that reading intersect with the film’s feminist leanings?).
I’m not sure Holofcener didn’t want the latino and latina characters to seem little more than props–and I also think Olivia’s slumming as a housekeeper is meant to be problematic. If it’s true that money is central, is, as you say, pretty much a given, then Holofcener couldn’t do this film any other way.
I enjoyed Francis McDormand’s performance immensely. I meant to post that in my comments, but I kept forgetting.
OK so I’ve thought a bit more . . . what’s problematic about Olivia, to me, is that the audience is meant to identify or at least sympathize with Olivia. She’s the one who has friends with money. She’s played by Jennifer Aniston (would Lily Taylor or Maggie Gyllenhaal have elicited different audience responses). She’s treated like dirt by Jimmy Caan’s son. She’s the central character. Plus, she gets the happy ending (so I guess I’m questioning if that ending is meant to be heavily or even lightly ironic . . . if so, to what purpose? how does it fit into the film’s dramatic action).
Other thoughts: Matt does fit into my “metrosexual male ideal” thesis as he is a kept man (and he mirrors Olivia in that he enjoys spending his wife’s money on $95 toddler shoes just as Olivia is going to enjoy spending the money of her new man).
That happy ending? I think Olivia is more into the comfort of this guy than the actuality of him, though Holofcener does offer us that moment before they leave for the dinner where he repeats her own complaint about such fund raisers (we’re meant to see them as two peas in a pod). Still, as she redecorates his house in her head, I was left a bit confused by the filmmaker’s intent or even how to receive the film on my own. Is it a critique of the wealthy or simply a comically realistic investigation into their lives. Does it interrogate upper-middle class privilege or is such privilege simply the back drop (and it is hard not to project the filmmaker onto Catherine Keener’s character seeing as she is a screenwriter). Finally, does the film suggest that gay men (or non-threatening metrosexuals) are the ideal or does the film offer up a “can’t live with them; can’t shoot them” embrace of “real” men (Keener’s sad final moments staring into the abyss that was once her marriage and her mirror as she attempts to complete a scene in her screenplay)?
We finally saw this, and both liked it quite a bit. A few tardy responses:
Olivia’s guy at the end may be filthy rich, and that did strike me at first as too neat (and it comes after, two short scenes in a row, a husband says to his wife “You were the prettiest one there”). As if after peeling off a layer of skin, so that our sensitivities were extraordinarily heightened as we read (appreciated, disliked, engaged with) the characters, the filmmaker eased up and smoothed some salve over the whole thing. Everyone gets a little love.
But in that closing scene in the bed, Olivia turns to her new sloppy beau and asks, “Hey, why did you make me charge less money?” And he gives a non-answer, skirts around–says he has people problems. And she says she does, too… but almost to soothe him, rather than (as the night before, when he echoes her comments about such fundraisers) seeing a kindred spirit.
And that’s what grabbed me. I really get Gio’s point about how these people find relationships that, imperfectly, do provide connection and comfort. But I was even more struck by the distinction to be drawn between the small moments of ugliness that drive Frances McDormand’s character crazy–piddling shit like stealing a parking spot, or cutting in line–and the small moments of compassion that we see each offering up. And I’ll emphasize the offering up; while Catherine Keener’s character is pleased to finally hear someone yell “Are you okay?” after barking her shin, she’s even more lovely when she raises her glass to Joan Cusack’s toast. They all, it seems to me, toast because it means something to Francine, and she means something to them–so they do it. And Olivia/Aniston, seeing something worthwhile in this new guy (not the money, or even the seemingly simpatico aspects of his character, but the true bleak filthy pathos of some aspects of his behavior), still offers up her hand, and (lying) says “Me, too.” That’s not so much a happy ending–but it’s a generous one.
And yet even that generosity is tinged with a certain irony: there are still the ‘prop’ maids, the privilege which underpins every one of these characters’ lives–that critical attitude toward their lives and their dissatisfactions never quite evaporates. It’s almost like we’re being offered up the opportunity to recognize their flaws, and to (generously) open up and embrace them, anyway.
I admit to feeling a little distant from Aniston’s character, whether by design or by performance (or simply from the iconicity of that actress)… and I think I preferred Holofcener’s last film, which was more devastating in both its scornful wit and its sadness. But, damn, it’s good stuff.