Not Enough Said About LA or Middle-Aged Dating in Nicole Holofcener's "Enough Said"

Ed note: This is a spoiler review. It is impossible to explain my disappointment with the film without revealing the plot.

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When the credits to Enough Said finished rolling at Cinema 1-2-3 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a block from Bloomingdales by the studio I live part-time, I turned to the 60ish couple behind me and said: “As a girl born and raised in LA and there part-time now, I feel compelled to say that while LA will never be New York, it’s not a town full of blithering idiots and mean people devoid of commonsense and intellectual depth.” They laughed, but to judge by the lobby chit chat,  most of these wealthy Baby Boomers at the shabby, old theater on 60th and 3rd seemed to enjoy the film.

Rotten Tomatoes had this to say:  ”Wryly charming, impeccably acted, and ultimately quite bittersweet, Enough Said is a grown-up movie in the best possible way.” I’ll sign on to the second claim and agree the film is worth seeing just for Gandolfini, the only worthwhile, sympathetic main character in the film. But “grown-up”? Compared to what, a bunch of 8th grade girls? This is not “a grown-up movie” unless you travel among the emotionally stunted and pathologically immature.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a successful masseuse who attends a party at a gorgeous house in West Los Angeles with yard large enough to entertain three or four dozen of the hosts’ closest friends. A divorced woman anxious about her daughter's imminent departure for college, Eva accompanies her best friend Sarah, a therapist amusingly portrayed by Toni Collette, and Sarah’s frustrated but solvent and affable husband, Will (Ben Falcone).

Eva tells Will she’s not attracted to anyone at the party, a fact Will bizarrely chooses to convey to Albert (Gandolfini), who immediately shoots back that he’s not attracted to anyone there either. This prompts a disarming “well, okay then” moment of awkwardness and sets the stage for Albert’s self-deprecating but sharp banter throughout the film. Eva slowly begins to fall for this burly, warm divorcee also facing an empty next in a matter of months.

Also in attendance is Marianne (Catherine Keener), Albert’s well-dressed and elegant yet bohemian poet ex-wife with an impeccably furnished Santa Monica home, whom I take it is supposed to be a Jorie Graham or Sharon Olds figure, that is, a poet who actually makes a living off her writing. (I’ve no idea if Holofcener is poetry-savvy enough to have chosen Marianne as the Keener character’s first name to evoke Marianne Moore, but the onomastic parallel immediately struck me during their funny introduction at the party when Eva thinks Marianne is kidding about her profession.)

Marianne becomes Eva’s client as well as friend after Marianne frankly admits that she has no friends, except Joni Mitchell, which appropriately impresses Eva. It soon becomes clear why this woman obsessed with her ex-husband’s faults but naturally oblivious to her own, is friendless: she’s a hyper-critical, bitter, snobbish woman who fairly exudes misery.

When a lesbian couple approaches Marianne during their walk on the bluffs to say a book of hers changed their lives, Marianne is pleasant but aloof, clearly uninterested in discussing whatever epiphany her poetry produced. Marianne dismisses them with the pretentious, New Age salutation one would expect from that obscenely wealthy and insufferable guru Marianne Williamson (the Course in Miracles lady): “Blessings!” Even Eva picks up on the absurdity of this–still dazzled by her smarter and more sophisticated friend famous enough to be approached on the street (or grass, as the case may be)–and self-consciously calls out to the couple: “Blessings!”

Eva and Marianne bond over terrible ex-husbands and disastrous marriages which never should been formed in the first place. Eva soon realizes that the ex-husband Marianne perpetually describes as slovenly, dull, and sexually repellent (with an odd aversion to onions in his guacamole) is Albert, Eva’s new boyfriend.

The initial date at a trendy restaurant, with long waits and loud music which the obnoxious server refuses to turn down, furnishes plenty of laughs, not least about how they’ve both gotten old enough to complain about music which prevents dinnertime conversation. The date goes well enough that Albert moves in for the kiss when he drops Eva at her house, but she’s “not sure” and the date ends awkwardly with a handshake.

The massage appointments are deft parodies of Angelenos in a position to pay for massage therapists to come to their homes. The funniest is the man in an upstairs apartment who never once offers to help Eva with her heavy table, which a very skinny Dreyfus can barely get up to his door. Before every session, the young man just stands at the top of the stairs, smiling both complacently and cluelessly as she labors up each individual stair. The well-to-do housewife who chatters breathlessly about her remodeling and kid dramas is also funny, as is the middle-aged man whose atrocious breath nearly induces fainting and a corresponding need for smelling salts.

Sadly–because obviously I wanted to love Gandolfini’s last project-the film takes a sharp nosedive when Eva makes the unfathomably stupid decision neither to inform Albert nor Marianne that she’s friends with her boyfriend’s ex-wife or her new friend’s ex-husband.  The scene of discovery verges on farce, with the beautiful but mean Parsons-bound daughter of Albert and Eva emerging from her sick bed and Eva (literally) hiding in the bushes in Marianne’s backyard. What is she, four? I’ve never met a met a middle-aged woman with or without a college-bound daughter who hides in the bushes.

One could perhaps say that Eva has just realized the coincidence and wants to wait until she’s alone with Marianne to break the news. And presumably, she’s slightly embarrassed to admit that she both cares about and feels attracted to the man whose character Marianne has been assassinating for weeks if not months. But she never reveals the truth to either party. More on this later.

The meet-and-greet with Tess (Eve Hewson), Albert’s stunning and sophisticated daughter, is flat out painful. Tess rejects the casual eatery Albert has chosen. This is not surprising given her fondness for Chanel “pocketbook[s],” which marks Albert as an East Coaster (it's telling that the only sympathetic character in the film is not from LA). When Tess asks where Eva’s daughter, Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) will be going to school and the proud mother says Sarah Lawrence, Tess–a better-looking, younger version of her arrogant mother–scoffs, “Oh, Sarah Lawrence isn’t what it used to be,” noting that it’s essentially a safety or backup school in her orbit.

After a disapproving paternal stare, she comes back with a perfunctory, “Well I’m sure it’s still good,” but the damage has been done. And when Tess admits that she hates kids and intends not to have any, Albert (who seems to morph into Gandolfini’s real-life self) charmingly replies, “Right now, I know what you mean.” This is be the film’s best line and moment.

One of the film’s most excruciating scenes is the two-couple dinner party at Sarah’s and Will’s expensive home, whose living room furniture she perpetually rearranges and replaces. Eva is a bear of very little brain and thus vulnerable to Marianne’s assessments of Albert, which unwittingly become her own.  She mocks his inability to whisper and takes potshots at his weight, informing them that she will buy a “calorie book” so that Albert knows, for example, just how fattening guacamole is. Even Sarah, hardly a paragon of sensitivity, says this is not a nice gift, but Eva will not relent. It’s all but unwatchable.

The only redeeming part of this climactic scene is the saga of the incompetent maid who insists on putting things in drawers no one would think to look for them. The phenomenon of the bad maid one can’t fire–while certainly a First World (or 1-2%) problem–is always good for a laugh in a crowd like this on the Upper East Side, or the comparable crowd on the Westside of LA, where most have at least part-time help.

My boyfriend is certainly not in the 2%, but as the son of two prominent, hardworking doctors, he grew up with full-time help. He doesn't send his laundry to fluff-and-fold but every two weeks, two women come to clean his condo.  Without fail, they rearrange (or hide things) in ways that defy logic. The best part is that Will thinks Sarah should herself fire the woman as a learning experience (instead of doing it himself), amusing given she’s a successful therapist who should be able to handle this relatively trivial conflict. 

The only longterm, intact marriage in the film exemplifies what Yale-trained historian Pamela Haag called in her well-written 2011 book (with an abominably long subtitle), Marriage Confidential, the ”low-conflict melancholy marriage” (NYT review of Marriage Confidential). It’s not all that melancholy, but it’s a mediocre union not unhappy enough to dissolve but certainly not satisfying enough for either spouse to enjoy. Both Sarah and Will are affable enough and I wouldn’t mind eating or drinking with them at Wilshire, one of Santa Monica’s best and most New York-style restaurants, but their marriage feels at best like an afterthought. The sex is long gone, a fact noted more than once.

At the graduation dinner for Ellen (at what looks like Guido’s on Santa Monica and Bundy, where I had my 1990 graduation dinner from Westlake School for Girls), the topics of marriage and divorce arise–truly bizarre and for this film, predictably inappropriate dinnertime chat–and Sarah muses all too personally about second marriages. The scene serves as the film’s second reminder that the personal lives of shrinks or therapists are often as disordered as those of the patients they treat. There’s a reason people say that shrinks often have the most troubled kids.

But the film’s most serious flaw is, as I suggested above, the far-fetched raison d’etre for the film’s dramatic moments. Albert shows up at Eva’s house, presumably to discuss their ongoing fight about who will move their daughter into school in that familiar rite of passage (recall the Clintons with the plastic boxes in Chelsea’s Stanford dorm). The confusion and hurt in his face upon when seeing Eva seated next to Marianne, the woman who has been so cruel to him, is palpable. 

The meeting goes badly for all concerned, particularly Eva, who has managed through her blundering idiocy to hurt a good man and a not good (or at least irremediably damaged) woman, for whom we at that moment can’t help feeling sorry. We even feel sorry for Albert’s and Marianne’s snotty daughter, whom we see once more at Albert’s house when Eva comes to beg for his forgiveness. “He really liked you,” Tess says softly from the threshold of her bedroom.

But how, precisely, did the dim Eva see this playing out? Did she think she could become a permanent fixture in this man’s life without having Tess, who met her at lunch with Albert, blow her cover? The young woman is understandably confused and hurt by her deception, thoughtless and unkind as she was at lunch.

I am a forgiving critic of film and even more forgiving of theater and musical comedy because I was deprived for so many years of both. But my one deal-breaker in a film is a plot with a structural flaw this great. I was so annoyed by Ides of March, which wasted four of the finest actors working today–Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Ryan Gosling–that I had to go out for a 20-minute smoke break. Had I been alone, I would simply have walked out and driven home. But as maddening as was the Ides of March, it’s ten times the film.  

You may recall the crux of that plot was the unwanted pregnancy of the Evan Rachel Wood character, the daughter of the (Catholic) DNC chair. She hits Clooney up for money for the abortion and Gosling takes her to the clinic! Am I to believe that a stunning, intelligent, charming woman can’t find 900 bucks, even if she has to borrow 200 or so from four college buddies?

Beyond the plot, I find Eva intolerable for the same reason I disliked Kristin Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids. I don’t find pathetic and lost middle-aged women who consistently make poor choices entertaining. Eva’s only true and touching emotional moment in the film occurs toward the end, when she and her ex-husband say goodbye to their lovely, introverted daughter at the airport and her husband says, “We made a fine person.” When Albert dumps her, I could only think: “Good, he deserves to be with someone with half a brain who has her s*** together.” 

To be fair, Eva is a loving and nurturing mother, at her finest as a surrogate mom to Chloe (Tavi Gevinson), her daughter's emotionally battered and fatherless best friend, with whom they go shopping at Elyse Walker in Pacific Palisades. Her concern for the sweet but needy girl bothers her own daughter, but it's one of her few redeeming qualities.

All three of the high school seniors were well-played, but Chloe has by far the best-written character. When the caricature of an evil, shallow mother pulls into Eva's driveway near the up end of the film, she yells: "Do you have a daughter? Because this one's mine!" She yanks Chloe's wrist and calls out, "Dyke!" It's a bizarre and ugly moment, particularly since there's nothing remotely gay about Eva. Of course Eva is so dumb and slow, she can't come up with a good retort. Even at my most stunned, I have a comeback and personally think the C word would have been an appropriate choice at that particular juncture. 

I was shocked to learn that a friend I respect on many levels, himself a writer and graduate of the Actors Studio, “loved” the film. I explained my position and I think he understood but still he disagreed. Maybe you have to know LA now (or be raised by accomplished lawyers and know only highly successful professionals and entertainers) to know that LA is no longer the town parodied by Woody Allen in Annie Hall.

I like Nicole Holofcener’s work and actually saw both Walking and Talking and Please Give in the theater. I didn’t realize how prolific she’d been on TV. She worked on an episode of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Gilmore Girls, and has an impressive CV. I liked Walking and Talking better than Please Give, with the incomparable Oliver Platt, but slight and narrow in scope as it was, I thought it was well-executed and worth seeing.

I also didn’t know until I looked her up on IMDB, that Ms. Holofcener was born and raised at least until high school at Windward on the Upper West Side. Her stepfather , Charles H. Joffe, produced most of Woody Allen’s films and provided him with one of his big breaks. And she lives in Venice, CA, with her two boys, which explains the silly but entertaining Friends with Money, a film with Jennifer Aniston I saw on cable.

I suppose Holofcener, in spite choosing to raise her boys in Venice, a trendy and gentrified Westside neighborhood, has never shaken the New York/Woody Allen view of Los Angeles. Again, the only ethical, interesting, together main character is Albert, an East Coaster.

A witty and talented Park Slope friend and writer said to me just this trip that LA had undergone a “cultural revolution” and was no longer a place populated by “ding-a-lings.” In other words, people in LA do read serious fiction, attend the very same schools New Englanders did and do, and function at comparable levels in large numbers.  Apparently, Holofcener thinks LA is still full of “ding-a-lings.” She’s wrong: I’ve never met this percentage of unpleasant and hopeless people in a group the size of the cast.