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NYC, present day, Kate (Keener) and her husband Alex (Platt) run a modern furniture shop, and have bought the adjacent apartment of theirs, but can only have it after the current occupant, the cantankerous 91-year-old Andra (Guilbert) dies, considering her long-in-the-tooth age, the wait shouldn’t be too long.

Acquiring their accessions with a fairly low price from the next-of-kins of the recently deceased, and then flip them for a much higher price tag in their boutique shop, Kate has become growingly flustered by guilt germinated from their pecuniary profiteering, and to allay which, she is more than willing to dish out small cash (even a 20$ note when she is in the mood) to panhandlers in the neighborhood (sometimes it is embarrassingly backfires), and seeks out some voluntary works for those who are considerably less fortunate than her. But how does it work? scenester filmmaker Holofcener’s PLEASE GIVE, her fourth feature, wrestles with this question in a brutally honest manner that it is almost touching in the end, when Abby (Steele), Kate and Alex’s zit-afflicted teenage daughter can finally have a pair of jeans she craves for, all thanks to Kate’s lofty gesture of shelling out 200$.

While Kate’s problem is chiefly, her paternalistic attitude of rearing her daughter, and a bleeding heart disposition that undermines her philanthropic resolution (she cannot turn off the waterworks when facing with disabled children, and geriatric duty is left with a loose end), and Keener is a fathomless wellspring of naturalistic demeanor, pitch-perfect affect within a wide compass of emotion; Alex is otherwise simply lumped as a complacent husband who is not above to frolic with some low-hanging fruit, but Platt’s nigh-to-zero sex appeal fails to make the affair feel authentic.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are Mary (an acerbic Peet goes for the kill) and Rebecca (Hall, wondrously expressive in her more underplayed, emotive modus operandi), the granddaughters of Andra and her caretakers, both single and fancy-free, the former is a cold-heartedly blunt hypocrite (she will not admit her radiant tan is achieved from a sun-bed, but has no hesitation to be catty about everyone else’s peccadillos) and the latter is a self-effacing and warmhearted angel, but guess which one does Abby find as a cool role model to emulate? The sharp irony and unsentimental rumination are Holofcener’s claims to fame, and PLEASE GIVE is illuminating in alerting us to inspect our own contradictory behavior patterns, for that effect alone, Holofcener’s sensibility and intellect should be drawn onto a bigger scope to shine and dazzle.

referential entries: Holofcener’s ENOUGH SAID (2013, 6.9/10); Yaron Zilberman’s A LATE QUATET (2012, 6.7/10).