A FILM OF ONE'S OWN

I can't write a movie review to save my life, but I am pretty good at giving stars. The film "Friends With Money" gets a gazillion. It's the most satisfying piece of art I've experienced in years.

I'm reading a book called "Nature Noir," in which a park ranger talks about the "strange peacefulness at the center of catastrophe." This film is about the strange catastrophe at the center of peacefulness.

I'm no movie buff — I haven't even seen "The Godfather" all the way through; I think "Citizen Kane" is a snooze — but I know this is a good movie because I can't stop thinking about it. And I will think about it a long time from now. I will encounter certain people, and the way my mind will deal with them will be to say, "Oh yes, this person is behaving just like that character in 'Friends with Money.'" Or just like a combination of those characters. I would have seen this behavior before but would not have been able to articulate it without this Rosetta Stone of all chick flicks.

While I was watching the film last night with my friend George, I kept recognizing people I knew in the characters on screen.

And I recognized myself in all of them:

In the Jennifer Aniston character — a pothead house cleaner who drops out of life, who stops caring what happens to her but who clings to free samples of expensive face cream.

In the Frances McDormand character — a clothing designer who gets unreasonably angry when people are petty or ill-mannered, when the world doesn't go the way it should go.
She can't see the point in washing her hair. She says what she thinks.

In the Catherine Keener character — who realizes too late that she has done a monstrous thing in the mundane, who has an epiphany about a loved one.

In the Joan Cusack character — who is caring, rich and blank.

And the men. One might be gay but loves his wife to pieces. One is a borderline sociopath who functions well in the world. One is caring, rich and blank. One is boring, poor and beastly. They all have "problems with people," but only one admits it.

No one knows how to live.

How can a movie be so fucking great? This is Goddamn Virginia Woolf in 2006.

These characters are so real I'll have memories of them doing things they didn't do. I'll forget some things they did do. I'll want to see the film again. But I won't. It's like a magical conversation with a special friend that you can have only once.