NICOLE HOLOFCENER notices little things. She is especially attuned to the contradictions that let slip who people are. She observes herself observing things, calibrates her reactions to her observations. Her work -- she makes deftly nuanced films about very particular kinds of people, people much like her -- is the outgrowth of her reflexive self-awareness.
If she thinks about something twice, she writes it down. Say a friend who has a lot of money loans money to another friend. She starts to notice how often people talk about money -- who picks up the check, who has a maid -- then starts questioning: Should someone have a maid when they don't have a job? Who's entitled to what, and why are we entitled to anything? Her friend has $10 million. Couldn't she just give her one? Would she even notice it was gone? And what would that do to the friendship? A few trains of thought in that direction and she types "Friends With Money" into the computer.
Two years and a thousand throwaway conversations, awkward encounters and funny, memorable micro-moments later, she's imprinted her observations on a quartet of female characters living in Los Angeles. "Friends With Money," which premiered on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, opens nationwide April 7. It stars Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack and Jennifer Aniston as longtime friends, at least three of whom live, very well, on the Westside.
It's a Westside that Holofcener details much the way Woody Allen chronicled a very particular Manhattan milieu in the 1970s. The characters -- a trio of well-off, married women in their 40s and their single, broke, thirtysomething friend -- are viscerally recognizable in their mix of longing, pettiness, doubt and sincere good intentions, all stoked by a cutthroat environment in which even virtue and generosity seem to wield a competitive edge -- and not just among those in the same privileged ZIP Codes.
"I think it's everywhere," Holofcener says one afternoon over lunch at Hal's Bar & Grill on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. It's just before Christmas and the lunch crowd is in full holiday mode. "I think it's heightened in L.A. because the wealth is so extreme because of the movie business and real estate. The cost of living is so high you have to be really, really rich to be rich. But I think everyone's comparing themselves, and measuring themselves against others. This is definitely a theme in 'Friends With Money.' The feeling that when you reach your 40s -- I imagine it happens to a lot of people, definitely to me -- you realize that everything has fallen together the way it's fallen together because of who you are and what you've done."
Too-loud laughter emanates from the private room near our table, where an office Christmas party seems to be in full, forced swing. A woman wafts by on a toxic cloud of perfume.
"The big goals are either here, or not so far away, or you've failed at them. But I don't think about that when I'm working, though. I just write about me and people I know. And from there, things develop."
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Creativity turns self-conscious
ANOTHER day, I visit Holofcener at the bright, airy house in Topanga that she shares with her twin 8-year-old sons, her editor boyfriend and her black-lab-and-chow-mix puppy, J.D. It's casually decorated with colorful furniture and framed photographs, and it's human-scaled, so that a McMansion dweller from a less surreal real estate market might mistake it for modest. She likes the place -- loves the garden and the view -- but it's a little remote and slightly Topangan for her taste and temperament, and she's not sure how long she wants to stay there.
Certain things that seem particularly native to the place get on her nerves, such as the craze for naming one's children torturously original names. ("Why doesn't anyone name their kid Michael anymore? It's like there's so much pressure to be original, it's not OK for someone to just be who they are.") Recently, she saw a flier in her neighborhood advertising a course in "inner birthing." "It was all about how to focus all your energy and attention on giving birth in this really conscious, really special, really meaningful way. I mean, how much more inner can you get? The baby is already inside you!"
Then again, this is just the kind of detail that makes her films so viscerally recognizable. There's a scene in "Friends With Money," for instance, in which McDormand mocks a new mother for naming her baby "Tal." "What if he turns out to be short?" she snorts.
It's the sort of crack Holofcener would think but not say. She did have a near miss, though, when someone introduced her child to her as "Ben." Holofcener was about to blurt, "Thank God, a normal name!" when the woman corrected her. "No, it's Pen. Short for Independence." Oh.
