There are, to be exact, three friends with money, and one without, a former teacher toiling now as a free-lance maid, helping herself to the bedside vibrator of one of her employers, and in her spare time harassing an ex-boyfriend with all-hours phone calls and hang-ups. The three with money additionally have mates. One of them, Catherine Keener, is collaborating with her husband on a screenplay, while adding an unsightly ocean-view second story on their home. Another, Frances McDormand, is a successful clothes designer with one child, plus a peculiar aversion to washing her hair, a reservoir of repressed anger, and a British-accented husband, a bath-products manufacturer, whom everyone but his wife recognizes as a closet homosexual ("Just because you care about what you wear doesn't mean to say you're gay"). The third, Joan Cusack, has a passel of kids, plenty of hired help with them, no job and no need of one, enough money to donate a spare couple of million to her children's school. Assuming the role of matchmaker, she introduces the moneyless and mateless friend, Jennifer Aniston, to her personal trainer, who begins to tag along with her on her housecleaning jobs and to demand a cut for haphazardly pitching in. Writer and director Nicole Holofcener, of Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, is very adept at finding and pointing out the faults in all these people (no one is exempt), and the entire movie has an air about it of catty girl talk, very concrete and specific and yet ultimately insubstantial and desultory: a litany of everyday outrages (people who cut in line at the cash register or steal parking spaces in the lot), a few useful tips for budget living (free cosmetics samples at the department stores), and of course some gripes about men (the cold-fish husband who won't be drawn into an argument, the blind date who can't tear his eyes from an old flame at the far end of the restaurant). Keener and McDormand are in another acting league, a tougher one, from Cusack and Aniston, but the facileness of the latter pair is not the sort of fault that the filmmaker is adept at pointing out. She is adept at minimizing it. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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