The Oncoming Hope

Reader, think back to one gloriously gruesome incident in S3 of Mad Men, when a rapacious Brit was sent crying (screaming) back to Blighty, feet in hand. Well, many of the tent-pole events in Mad Men are inspired by real life incidents, and I wondered, when in real life did a young man find himself so memorably dismembered in a New York office building? To the interwebs, I say!

Once more, with feeling: "Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building." Poor George S. Millet lost his life in a manner most embarrassing.

Serendipity works in wonderful ways. Thank a filmmaker named Pes for discovering this tombstone in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In his post on Cartoon Brew, he linked a New York Times story that gets to the heart of this mysterious indoor impalement. I recommend reading the entire article (the greatest tragedies are marked with the greatest silliness), but here's the pertinent bit:

Yesterday he came down and remarked that it was the anniversary of the wreck of the Maine. He explained that he knew it because the ship had been blown up on his birthday and that he was 15 yesterday.

At once the girls began to tease him. They told him that on such an occasion he deserved a kiss, and every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year that he had lived. He laughingly declared that not a girl should get near him, and was teased about it all day.

As 4:30 o'clock came, and the boy's work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so.

"I'm stabbed!"

One might say that poor George S. Millet met the real Kiss of Death.

While I cannot be certain that this inspired the great lawnmower incident, it perfectly matches the double bill of hilarity and gore.

I waited a while to see this movie, not because I'd heard particularly bad things about it, but because a friend and I were talking about a perplexing and irritating new trend in movies (and in books, but that's a topic for another time): New York stories about New Yorkers doing upper class New York things and basically being...New Yorkey. It's the land of Sex and the City, where no homeless people exist except as ways to demonstrate what kind of people our characters are, where everyone is white, and the most pressing drama is always existential, never concrete.

Please Give doesn't quite go that far, but it veers very close. Of the main characters, all but Rebecca Hall are truly horrible, and not just horrible, but really the most horrible people in the world. Are we really expected to feel any sort of sympathy for a girl who literally takes money from her mother's hands when she's trying to give it to a homeless man? A teenager who wants  $200 dollar jeans and hates that her mom gives the money to the needy instead. Horrible. But so OBVIOUSLY horrible.

And Amanda Peet. Also very obviously horrible, asking Catherine Keener about what she's going to do with the place when her grandmother dies, IN FRONT OF HER DYING GRANDMOTHER ON HER GRANDMOTHER'S BIRTHDAY. And did you know she's horrible?

Not that Peet is capable of playing any kind of role other than bad, of course. I can imagine her having conversations with her agent:

"Oh, Amanda, you're so bad!"

"Oh agent, I hate you and you're a dirty cocksucker."

"Oh Amanda, you're so bad! Let me get more roles for you so you can annoy people other than me."

I would formally request Hollywood to ban Amanda Peet from acting, ever again. She's a soul-sucking vacuum that draws life and reality from any story; a plastic mannequin standing in place of what should be challenging and compelling characters. Oliver Platt is equally guilty in this film, but I give him a pass as he has been great in past roles.

Catherine Keener, who's normally impossible to hate, gets the most abjectly boring story - she feels guilty. Not guilty about anything real, but that irritating white upper class guilt, where she feels bad about being rich (but not really), about not being disabled (but again, not really). She does in fact have real problems in the form of her sociopathic teenage daughter and lecherous husband, but somehow those things don't matter. Her existential guilt is what matters to director Nicole Holofcener. And the moral of her story? It truly is better to buy her daughter $200 jeans than to, say, teach her to be a better person.

It's a non-wacky movie that tries desperately to be wacky, turning humans into ciphers instead of real people (again, with the exception of Rebecca Hall). I just don't know how I feel about a movie where everything that happened is totally inevitable. Where everything that happens is not only foreshadowed, but fore-highlighted. As irritating as it was, you just KNEW Keener was going to buy acne-brat those jeans. You knew that the grandmother was going to die, and that Amanda Peet would continue to be crass and horrible. There was not a single surprise, and not a single instance of forward momentum.

The only thing to recommend this movie is that it does have genuinely funny moments. But skip it, unless Manhattan Malaise is your cup of tea.