by MATTHEW HAYS

Watching Friends With Money, one can only hope that filmmaker Nicole Holofcener wasn’t attempting to cash in on star Jennifer Aniston’s famous sitcom lineage. If you can believe it, the million-dollars-per-episode actress is cast here as a desperate and somewhat lost Los Angelian, forced to scrape a living together by being a maid. Yes, you read right, a maid.

The set-up is that an ensemble of connected friends are all dealing with thirty- and forty-something angst. Most of them are wealthy, except for Aniston. Holofcener has pulled together a fine ensemble here, beyond any doubt, including Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack. They are all playing high-strung women, and other than Aniston, are fraught with upper-middle-class anxiety. Chronically unhappy and neurotic, they face various ethical dilemmas while attempting to confront the things that make them so emotionally charged. It often feels like Woody Allen transplanted to another coast.

This film was a hit at Sundance, a film festival that has been praised high and low for helping to create a market and space away from the oppressive blockbuster culture that Hollywood morphed into by the ’80s. Laudable, certainly, and if Sundance did indeed have anything at all to do with the creation of a fine film like Capote, then Robert Redford deserves a string of medals. Having said that, Sundance has also favoured and heralded a certain strain of filmmaking, of which Friends With Money is a textbook example.

This is a quirky little film in which quirky characters exchange quirky bits of dialogue. It’s about the little moments in life, which are purported to add up to make a profound whole. Sadly though, these characters are so mind-numbingly narcissistic that it’s difficult to care about them. Holofcener is a talented filmmaker—her previous film, Lovely and Amazing, made my top-10 list in 2002—but here I just couldn’t care less about the dilemmas faced by a bunch of rich white folk living in L.A. In Friends With Money, too much quirkiness has ironically become part of that growing cinematic phenomenon: a Sundance cliché.

Friends With Money opens Friday, April 21

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