What Do Rich People Do All Day?

A succession of disembodied breasts placed on a mammogram machine opens Nicole Holofcener’s 2010 film Please Give. The hypnotic montage – absurd, comic, yet with undertones of malignance and mortality – is a fitting microcosm of Holofcener’s bittersweet oeuvre which, over three decades and six films, has defamiliarised the lives of upper middle class Americans and laid bare their myths and rituals, their worries and morality.

You might be forgiven for being a little sceptical about Holofcener’s films. With a slightly glossy look to them and often starring actors more familiar to US television than ‘serious cinema’, they initially appear to be just more popular culture that seeks to glamourise the middle class professional, aged 20-40, who lives in New York, LA, London or Paris and works in publishing or media. Yet while TV series like Friends or Emily in Paris, and films like The Holiday or most things by Richard Curtis naturalise this aspirational urbanite and their ‘universal’ quests for love and corporate success, Holofcener’s films do the opposite. In films like Friends with Money (2006) and Please Give (2010) she denaturalises the lives of wealthy metropolitans, showing them in all their particularity and strangeness. You’ll find no Hollywood mythology here: no meet-cutes, no dash to stop the wedding, and no happily ever after. Instead you will be shown a novel world where characters fret about charity galas, hoard face cream, and anguish over extending their homes, all the while trying to stave off an encroaching despair in the face of it all. Her characters play like updated versions of those in the stories of John Cheever, who, in the 50s and 60s, memorably depicted characters attempting to wrest meaning out of life in the new, rarefied suburbs. Both Holofcener and Cheever depict tightly codified social landscapes where unspoken rules determine who you should keep company with and how you spend your time; where having money hasn’t resulted in unrestrained freedom and self-fulfilment but simply created new sets of obligations, rituals, and anxieties.

Holofcener’s Friends with Money is perhaps her most sustained engagement with the subtleties of this world. The film is a network narrative looking at a group of friends in LA consisting of three well-off couples plus one outlier: Olivia (Jennifer Anniston) who is unmarried, has recently quit her teaching job, and is now cleaning houses. The three couples spend much of the film worrying about Olivia’s romantic and professional problems. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a maid – Holofcener’s characters are rarely openly snobbish – it’s just that, to Olivia’s circle, the category of ‘maid’ and ‘friend’ should not commingle. This kind of conceptual separation is brought out when Olivia’s wealthiest friend Franny (Joan Cusack) and her husband (Gregg German) discuss their child’s trampoline:

Franny: I mean, kids get paralyzed falling off them.

Matt: You put a net around it.

Franny: I think we should just get rid of it. I think the maid would take it.

Matt: But then her kids would get paralyzed.

Franny: Oh, yeah. Right.

In Franny’s mind, the maid’s kids and hers are simply incomparable beings. A similar social chasm is exposed in Cheever’s short story ‘The Trouble with Marcie Flint’. The tale follows the eponymous housewife as she deals with her husband’s continued, unexplained absence from the family home in Shady Hill. In one sinister scene Marcie is called on by her neighbour Matt who comes to ward her off from seeing Noel Mackham – a “meatball” who writes textbooks and hails from a nearby lower-class neighbourhood. When Marcie protests that Noel is human like everyone else, Matt responds:

“Of course he’s human, but so is the garbage man and the cleaning woman”.

In Cheever’s world, these people are human alright, but they might as well not be, so unthinkable is the concept of seeing one of them socially. Ultimately, Cheever’s world is more stringent than Holofcener’s whose characters have more of a sense of self-awareness about the unfairness and absurdity of the relations that they are reproducing. Yet, this awareness doesn’t mean that Holofcener’s characters can transcend these rules, and the characters in Friends with Money continue to have difficulty accepting Olivia as she moves further away from their social group, becoming less understandable to them. Towards the end of the film Franny wonders to her husband whether, if she met her now, she’d be friends with Olivia: her final answer is, she admits, “probably not”.

Just as they can’t overcome their ambivalence towards Olivia, Holofcener’s characters in Friends with Money seem similarly trapped by custom in how they spend all their free time and money. Christine (Catherine Keener) and her husband David (Jason Isaacs), for instance, are engaged in a costly, large-scale effort to extend their house, justified by little more than, as David puts it, “everybody in the neighborhood is doing this”. Their almost Buñuellian project reaches its apotheosis when Christine and David’s marriage finally breaks down, rendering their family home meaningless. Meanwhile, most of Franny and Matt’s plot centres around a charity fundraiser hosted by their stockbroker’s wife which they have paid to attend with their friends. Holofcener shows how these elaborate giving rituals are entered into more out of custom and vanity than out of genuine engagement with the charitable cause. Indeed, the characters all seem mostly concerned with what they’re going to wear to the event and get repeatedly mixed up about whether the event’s for ALS sufferers or homeless people. The absurdity of the ritual is finally articulated by Olivia when she questions Franny:

Olivia: I mean, they waste all this money on these parties. Why don't they just give the money to the scientists or to the sick people? Franny: But you know what? They don't. They throw a party so rich people like me can spend $10,000 on a table and then they give it to the sick people. Okay? That's how it's done.

Again, Holofcener depicts Franny as perfectly cognisant of the irrationality of these dinners, yet she remains tied to these ceremonies of wealth and her final declaration – ‘that’s how it’s done’ – reveals just how compulsory and non-negotiable they are. After all, Franny has millions; $10,000 to keep relations between her and her stockbroker operating smoothly is a no-brainer.

The potentially disingenuous and compulsory nature of philanthropic activities is also explored in Cheever’s ‘The Trouble with Marcie Flint’. This begins when Marcie realises that her husband’s protracted absence is starting to make her stand out in Shady Hill:

“Her neighbours had stood by her handsomely during the first weeks, but she knew, herself, that an odd woman can spoil a dinner party”

To stave off the gossip and avoid alienation, Marcie joins various evening clubs and accepts a position on the Village Council. Though ostensibly an organ for the betterment of the community, the council is mostly engaged in trying to prevent a public library opening in Shady Hill, which members fear could lead to “development”, ruining the exclusivity of the community. Again, as with the charity dinner, effecting change or doing good is a facade that masks an obligatory ritual that keeps things as they are. Indeed, Marcie’s faux pas is that she misreads the purpose of the Village Council and puts effort into reviving the library project. It is ultimately this, rather than her brief, unassuming affair, which holds significance in the narrative and represents Marcie’s true betrayal to her community.

Both Cheever and Holofcener depict flat, stultifying societies where codes and hierarchies limit and constrain action to an almost unbearable level. Yet what makes them so enjoyable are the rounded characters that inhabit these worlds. Their characters are not the dystopian stereotypes of films like Blue Velvet, The Stepford Wives or Get Out, but ones who are often all too aware of the inadequacy of the specious rites and ceremonies that fill their days.

Both Cheever’s and Holofcener’s characters can ultimately be seen trying to overcome their material, individualistic culture in search for something beyond themselves. In Cheever’s fictions this often takes the form of characters who try to reimagine their suburban surroundings as an enchanted mythopoeia. One glimpses this way of looking in ‘Marcie Flint’ when Marcie’s husband richly describes a resplendent scene where his children play with “talismanic planes”, he drinks a “libation” and he becomes enchanted by the “golden light on the grass and the trees'' and “the whiteness of Marcie’s thighs”. This mythical reconceptualisation of the suburbs reaches its peak in Cheever’s later enigmatic masterpiece ‘The Swimmer’, where the once virile Neddy imagines the string of swimming pools leading the four miles to his house not as a series of private status symbols, but as a great open river, which he makes it his heroic quest to conquer. Such imaginative flights are often the final gasps of characters on the brink of exile from the community they’re trying to reimagine – in ‘Marcie Flint’, her husband’s reverie conceals the imminent breakdown of their marriage, while Neddy’s reimagining masks his financial ruin. Nonetheless, they stand as moments of fleeting resistance against a culture that otherwise reduces imagination to cookie cutter reading groups and committee meetings. In contrast, Holofcener’s characters don’t reach for such imaginative/delusional heights and instead find salvation in small moments of genuine generosity, compassion or shared vulnerability, whether it’s an unprovoked compliment to a spouse on a drive home, or Olivia admitting to a partner that she’s got problems. It’s in such moments that Holofcener’s characters reveal that they can be better than the narrow, consumerist worlds in which they find themselves enmeshed.

Of course, these glimpses of transcendence do not address the issue of living in a society where some people have so much money while so many have so little. Yet, by depicting their characters honestly as part of a specific social structure; by not effacing their wealth or hiding the strangeness of their day-to-day lives, Holofcener and Cheever bring us characters who, though we may laugh at or sometimes view with horror, we nonetheless come to understand. Their works demonstrate better than most that it’s possible to care about and sympathise with characters without agreeing with them or wanting to be like them.

Fred Warren is a writer, filmmaker and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions who graduated from the University of Exeter with a degree in English.