Friends With Money	Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Yeah, I know…this is another one of those DVDs I’m turning into a full length review.  When I watched Friends With Money this past weekend, the movie didn’t set right with me; and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.  It was one of those films that had me stumped as to how I could sit through 90 minutes of confusion and not know why I was so pissed about writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s character study of rich L.A. women in their 40s.  Two of the four women are just annoying:  Christine (Katherine Keener), the screenwriter who is too self-absorbed to realize she and her husband don’t care about one another anymore, and wealthy, stay-at-home mom, Franny (Joan Cusack), who’s biggest concern is finding a “charity” she deems worthy enough of receiving her two million dollar donation.  Granted, we do get to see Christine wake up and smell the impending divorce; but, Franny just seems to be there for decoration…no problems, no worries, no nothing.  The other two women seem to have a little more substance to their characters:  Jane (Francis McDormand) the clothing designer with more anger management issues than former Hoosier coach Bob Knight in his chair-throwing days, and Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who gave up a decent teaching gig to coast through life as a pot-smoking maid with low self-esteem.  Unfortunately, Holofcener never develops Jane and Olivia enough for us to actually care about them.  Instead, we are left wondering what in the hell made them so fucked up.  At best, Friends With Money is a series of events with little or no explanation to their existence and no sense of direction.  The entire film jumps from scene to scene like a desperate drug addict looking for their next fix.  If this is supposed to be a character study, then why isn’t any explanation given about the characters?  Why don’t their lives ever seem to evolve into something tangible?  How did they get to this point in their lives?  Seriously!
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics			I’ve seen tons of movies with unstructured, crappy plotlines.  Hell, most of what I watch is nothing but wasted celluloid full of bad writing; so, it couldn’t have been the narrative that was pissing me off.  It had to be the ideological message that had gotten under my skin and started to fester.
OK, I knew I was identifying with Olivia because of her financial status, lack of direction, and low self esteem.  Granted, my self-loathing doesn’t sink to the same pitiful depths as hers does (i.e. I wouldn’t hesitate to put my foot in a boyfriend’s ass if he tried to swindle me out of the little money I do have).  However, it took an email to my favorite aunt to finally figure out why my identification with Olivia was driving me crazy; and, this was her response:  “I think maybe the movie did a good job, because you identified enough with Aniston's character to get pissed off. Her low self-esteem was enough to make the viewer scream; her downfall wasn't her lack of money but her lack of regard for her self. Her 'friends' seemed to keep her around as a reminder of how superior they were to her, rather than being true friends. With that bunch of friends, who needs enemies? But maybe that was the intent of the movie, to show that 'friends' really aren't friends in the true sense of the word. Maybe people keep friends around who somehow feed their own needs, in this case the need to be seen as kind and benevolent in the face of their opulence. It was one of those movies that the sum of the parts was less than the sum of the whole.”     She's right.  After I finally stripped away the layers of isolated situations and looked at how the 4 women interacted with one another, it didn't take long to realize that Friends With Money should've been called Bitches With Money.  The three screwed-up rich women (Christine, Franny, and Jane) are complete bitches to their friend who has no money - Olivia.
But, what really made me mad was the ending.  When Olivia finds out her new boyfriend is rich, it felt as if Holofcener was telling me the only solution to her financial problems is to turn Olivia into what the rest of her “friends” already are… another bitch with money.  © K & G 2006		Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics