A Westside story

CONSIDER this a warning. If you make your home in one of the affluent parts of Los Angeles, especially on the Westside, Nicole Holofcener knows where you live. She might even be under the bed, taking notes. She knows all of our secrets and our lies, how we fight and fool ourselves and each other, how we hurt and how we love. She knows it all, and she's put it into one piercingly observed, achingly perceptive film, "Friends With Money."

"Friends" is the writer-director's third feature, following "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing," projects much admired for their individuality, insight and ability to eavesdrop on contemporary reality. But this piece takes Holofcener's gifts to a new level, deepening her sensibility, broadening her appeal and in all ways fulfilling the promise of what came before.

With a quartet of splendid actresses -- Catherine Keener, Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack -- playing friends who have all kinds of issues with the love and money that is and isn't in their lives, the result is an exquisitely calibrated hypermodern comedy of manners. A quiet but devastating ensemble piece, both acerbic and sweet, "Friends" blends empathy and a great sense of comic timing with the richness of Holofcener's trademark take-no-prisoners observations.

In fact, the writer-director holds such a keen mirror to modern times, has such a perfect ear for who we are and how we live in this particular corner of the world -- brie on wheat bread, anyone? -- that she brings another writer to mind. A woman who advised a young writer that "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on" and who famously never expanded her horizons beyond "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush." A woman named Jane Austen.

Calling Holofcener the Jane Austen of West L.A. not only is not a stretch, it points up one of the exceptional qualities of her work. The very specificity of the film's participants -- people who shop at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, go to movies on the Third Street Promenade and eat in Chaya Venice -- gives them the heft of reality and truth that is essential for creating universality. As Holofcener says in the press notes, "the issues that the characters themselves have could be anywhere. Self-loathing, narcissism and pain is not limited to Los Angeles."