Chick Clique

Friends With Money

Directed by Nicole Holofcener

Although Nicole Holofcener's specialty has been showing middle-class white women at loose ends (Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), she has become the small-scale wonder of indie movies not for flattery but because her heroines are seen intimately, concisely and without judgment. It's a feat comparable to Whit Stillman's: Holofcener redefines whiteness as a specific social experience, not the (Hollywood) norm. Her characters are constantly confronted with what they are not and what they don't have-the essence of modern, comic frustration. This makes them lively and familiar, even when not immediately likable.

Holofcener's new film, Friends with Money, uses class as its obvious subject, but the problem goes deeper-too deep for Holofcener to resolve through her usual delicate methods. Her all-star cast (Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack and Frances McDormand) hit their marks but without penetrating the crisis. This chick clique of mostly affluent California careerists constantly worry about each other; their man/money problems reflect the disincentives of class-which is at least more artful than the noisome Sex and the City.

Downwardly mobile Aniston, who works as a maid, cadges Lancome's Résolution and Chanel's Précision, but this female consumer-addict irony traps Holofcener in the unconscious privilege she had seemed to be dismantling.

So far, Holofcener had avoided the sensibility of a New Yorker short story writer. Now, her biggest film yet is hobbled by vaguely snobbish class desires-strangely enough, the same failing that besets the black, Southern, teenage identity flick ATL. This may be authentic, but it's also confused and formulaic. Holofcener's good, but she should consult Mike Leigh's Career Girls.