Writer-director Nicole Holofcenere debuted with Walking and Talking, the 1996 female-bonding movie about what happens when one of two gal-pals decides to get married. The filmmaker's work pivoted on the "observational humor" Seinfeld thrived on, and on minimalist motifs Seinfeld had already done to death, like a date hearing an answering-machine message referring to him as "the ugly guy."
Based on that film and her new one, Lovely & Amazing, I think Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.
Although the new movie has a gag about "re-gifting" -- giving other people presents originally given to you -- that's straight out of a Seinfeld episode, I'm not sure I'd call it a work of observational humor. This story about a dysfunctional Los Angeles family made up of a mother going through liposuction (Brenda Blethyn), her two grown daughters (Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer) and her adopted young daughter (Raven Goodwin), is more like observational pathos -- maybe even observational self-pity.
Many things link this quartet, few of them good. Blethyn's mother, a demon over-decorator, has passed down a bizarre creative gene to her oldest daughter, Keener, who tries to make some money selling all-too-precious miniature chairs, and to Mortimer, an actress. Both have cellar-level self-esteem.
Keener epitomizes the homecoming queen who, 18 years later, flails around for something decent to do with her life -- she's astonished that a girlhood classmate could be a successful pediatrician -- and can find nothing to talk about except the experience of natural childbirth (she has one daughter). Mortimer is so insecure about her body image that she asks a hot-shot actor (Dermot Mulroney) to offer a critique of her nude figure. Goodwin has a plight that goes beyond her youthful pudginess: African-American in an otherwise all-white family and caught in a weird sisterly rivalry with Keener, she acts up and acts out, whether disrupting her swimming lessons or getting her hair straightened.
Holofcener does have an eye for casting: Her performers for Walking and Talking included Anne Heche, Todd Field (who went on to direct In the Bedroom), Liev Schreiber (the inveterate scene-stealer, most recently in The Sum of All Fears), The West Wing's Allison Janney, and Keener. In Lovely & Amazing, Mortimer has some fearless and original moments, especially when she displays herself to Mulroney -- going beyond both hope and dread, she conveys a naked need to be certified as an attractive woman, or maybe just a woman, period.
