Friends with Money

I saw Friends with Money last night and was pleasantly surprised. The film serves as a snapshot of a group of (mostly rich) friends in Los Angeles, the non-rich exception being the Jennifer Aniston’s also non-married Olivia. Olivia works as a maid because in her former job, as a teacher, she felt condescended to by her students. How she avoids this same fate as a maid is left unexplained, but it doesn’t really matter. There is plenty of preposterousness to this movie’s setup: for example, the typical questions about how someone who looks like Jennifer Aniston can end up as a penny-pinching, lonely, hopeless maid. But this is the movies, so let’s just accept it and move on. We go to the movies to entertain the possibility that there might exist some Jennifer Aniston-caliber diamond in the rough because, one, we don’t want to watch movies about, you know, ugly people, and two, we want to believe that we might one day meet someone like Jennifer Aniston who has somehow flown under the radar for the first thirty-odd years of her life and whose hotness has gone, inexplicably, unnoticed.

As for the story, not a whole lot happens in this movie. The married couples have their various married couple crises, and Olivia flits around trying to find a man and some sort of direction in her life, but she just can’t. There’s a minor subplot about some guy she used to date, whom she calls and hangs up on repeatedly, which doesn’t seem to make much sense or add anything to the movie, but it at least gives us a glimpse into her emotional state and potential screw looseness.

What makes the movie enjoyable is simply the quality of the writing and acting. The characters are all richly drawn and superbly acted, as one would expect from this cast. They all have flaws, and obstacles in their lives, and watching them manage these is quite entertaining. Their problems existed before the movie begins, and not much is necessarily resolved at the end. You get the impression that the movie could have started at any random point in their lives, run for two hours, and been equally entertaining. Despite their various flaws, it’s not hard to get invested in these characters, the end result being a movie that plays less like a movie and more like an extended episode of a good TV show. This could be seen as a flaw, I suppose, but if you want to spend 88 minutes with some engrossing characters, Friends with Money is a fine choice.