Enough Said

Nicole Holofcener is the woman’s answer to the manboy genre that dominates American film comedy. Judd Apatow represents that cycle at its best, bawdy macho tales about men who haven’t grown up. Where these films respect women by sympathetically marginalizing them, Holofcener makes women her central characters, their psychology her primary interest and their self-realization her main objective. Of course, that makes her films vital viewing for men -- at least, those who want to have a shot at understanding women. Yeah, I guess it’s also good for women to have a voice and a reflection

Enough Said is enough of an improvement over her previous feature Friends with Money (2006) that we can talk about her as a significant auteur. She writes brilliant, offbeat scripts, with prickly, funny dialogue, centered on a circle of close women friends that witness the central woman’s descent and resurrection. Her new heroine, masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is an elaboration of Jennifer Aniston’s teacher-turned-maid in Friends with Money, a smart, plucky woman who hasn’t a strong enough sense of herself to take control of her life. The first film would have been stronger had Aniston and Francis McDormand switched roles, ignoring Aniston’s box office clout. Now Holofcener didn’t have to make such compromises. Her blue chip cast is perfectly cast.

In Enough Said the three central women are all in healing professions, but they are not healing themselves. In fact they’re ignoring their own major issues by focusing on the trivial. In addition to masseuse Eva, who heals the body, Sarah (Toni Collette) is a therapist -- healing the mind -- who ignores her marital issues by constantly rearranging the furniture. Marianne (Catherine Keener) is a poet -- healer of the soul -- whose poems speak to the afflicted but she has no interest in the readers who thank her for saving them. Eva is so bored by her self-absorbed clients that she’s jolted when one asks about her Thanksgiving plans. Patients and healers are all self-absorbed.

Eva’s reluctance to grow up is manifest in several ways. She is so dependent on her daughter that even before she loses her to college she tries to replace her with her daughter’s friend Chloe (Tavi Gevinson). Eva tries to cultivate a girl-friend relationship with Chloe, even advising her to give up her virginity. Only at the end does Eva marshall the self-respect to ask a strapping young male client to help her carry her heavy massage table up his steep stairs. 

Primarily, Eva lets her new friend/client Marianne poison her relationship with her new lover Albert (James Gandolfini). Eva lets her ramble on about what a terrible husband her ex was, without admitting that he’s Eva’s current lover. Unable to accept her own feelings for Albert, Eva lets Marianne unwittingly poison her perception of him. Eva buys Marianne’s criticisms of him, however trivial. He swirled the onions out of his guacamole, he was fat, he was messy around the house. When Eva sets up a dinner date to get Sarah’s professional perspective, she gets tipsy and critical and leaves Albert feeling he’s just been on a date with his ex-wife.

Marianne ended her marriage and Eva suspends her affection for Albert for the silliest of reasons. Little peccadillos are ballooned into problems. Like Sarah rearranging the furniture, both woman reject Albert because they demand perfection at the cost of a perfectly fine reality. That’s Holofcener’s message to women: Don’t buy the popular culture’s delusion that you can have a perfect life by getting the material details right and holding out for some dream man. It keeps Desperate Housewives running but it won’t give you a happy life. 

At first Gandolfini’s character seems to have stumbled in from one of those Apatow comedies. But he doesn’t have buddies, he has a strong healthy sense of himself, he is happy with his work as a custodian of culture (working in an archive of classical TV, where Holofcener learned her craft) and he appreciates and understands Eva. He admits he was heart-broken when she let his ex distort her sense of him. Though he seems a boy slob Albert is a sensitive, generous man who quickly dedicates himself to Eva. That’s as ideal as reality can provide. In fact, Albert's self-awareness is what all the women lack. 

When we see the exes -- Marianne’s Albert, Eva’s ex -- it becomes apparent that those marriages could have survived if the women had been open to making genuine compromises. Both men are of decent character. Their lovers could have preferred the character over surface flaws. (Except for Albert’s loud “whispering” at the movies, for which he should of course be shot.) The illusion that a better relationship may lie around the corner drove both women out of their marriages, and almost drove Eva out of Albert. The dinner scene shows Sarah on the verge of similarly casting off her husband, not because he’s bad or inappropriate but because she lets small things about him irritate her. She may have been saved by her maid’s storming out after her mistaken abuse. Like Eva, perhaps Sarah will learn to accept her man’s imperfections when she realizes her own.

But Enough Said. All three healers know what to do, what to advise, what to say. It’s the doing, the putting of those words into sensible, practical action that spoils their contentment and undermines their lives. Perhaps the two freshman daughters will learn better -- be more realistic -- and do better for themselves by accepting that in others less may well be more.     

Gandolfini -- to whom the film is dedicated -- is wonderful. This film shows we have lost much more than Tony Soprano.