Friends With Money (DVD)

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Poor Jennifer Aniston. First Brad Pitt dumps her in the most public break-up since "King Kong," and then, in her very next film, she has to play the unmarried and unattached fourth-wheel among well-to-do friends. But Olivia (Aniston), who quit teaching at a high-end school because the students kept trying to give her quarters, isn't pathetic because she's poor, "single, a pothead, and a maid." There are plenty of happy poor people, maids, potheads, and unmarried people in this world. This kid is a wreck because her friends' lives amplify the pettiness of her own with all the blaring clarity of a heavy metal concert.

While she's so poor that she's going all over town scamming free Lancôme skin products, one friend (Joan Cusack, as Franny) and her husband (Greg Germann, "Allie McBeal") are trying to decide which cause gets their money this year, and they're leaning toward handing 2.1 million dollars over to their daughter's school. Meanwhle, Christine (Catherine Keener) is a successful writer who works simultaneously on opposing computers with her co-writer spouse, David (Jason Isaacs). And Jane (Frances McDormand) seems to have nothing better to do with her life than shop until the clerks and other customers drop and fend off speculation that her husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney) is gay or bi-.

At one point, Franny wonders aloud whether they would be friends if they had met now instead of an unspecified "then." The answer, of course, is a big fat "no." These people have nothing in common. More pointedly, when they're together there's no sense that they are really close or caring about one another. There's none of the joking intimacy that you got with Aniston's TV "Friends," and none of the sisterhood bonding that the "Sex and the City" gang displayed. And we don't even get so much as a hint as to why they became friends in the first place, or why they continue. As a result, the film feels smart and interesting, but not all that emotionally engaging.

McDormand remarks in a bonus feature that third-time director Nicole Holofcener ("Walking & Talking," "Lovely & Amazing") is "really a great chronicler of female behavior." I won't argue with that. All of the women's behavior seems insightful and spot-on. Holofcener is also very good with dialogue and small moments, though one wishes for just a few larger ones to add a little stormy arc to an otherwise pretty even-keeled narrative.

Oh, there are small plots happening here and there. Holofcener, who also wrote the screenplay, tries to show that no life is all that wonderful. Catherine and David are so out of tune with each other that it takes her three weeks to notice he's shaved off his beard and he doesn't seem to notice (or care) if she burns herself in the kitchen. Franny is coping with that gay thing. But as for Jane? I guess the very rich do go happily on. When you add it all up, though, none of it amounts to much in the way of dramatic questions or narrative tension. The most interesting plot actually involves poor Olivia, who's so desperate that she agrees to a blind date with Jane's personal trailer (Scott Caan), and she's so hang-dog meek that she lets this arrogant, unprincipled, and lazy fellow do all sorts of things with (and to) her. But things pick up when a nerdy client of hers (Bob Stephenson) asks her out. Curiously, though, when the most engaging moments in a film jam-packed with big stars comes from an ordinary average overweight nerd, you know that the other characters haven't been given enough to make them memorable.