The filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has a cat named Peggy, with one back leg that doesn’t touch the ground when she moves: the limb twists sideways, so that it shoots into the air as the cat hop-steps through life. “I found her a couple blocks from here, on the street,” Holofcener said, sitting in the back yard of her house, in Venice, California, petting Peggy in the bland sunlight. “I didn’t steal the cat. But the cat was behind a fence. There were paper plates of old cat food all over the front yard, and she was covered in scabs.” Peggy purred and leaned into Holofcener. “She was pretty vicious,” Holofcener said, jerking her hand away from Peggy’s head to avoid getting bitten. “And now she’s a little princess.”
This is the kind of creature Holofcener is drawn to: weirdly alluring, mangled by life, and unable to resist lashing out against her own best interests. In Holofcener’s second film, “Lovely and Amazing,” a frustrated artist, played by Catherine Keener, takes a job at a one-hour-photo store so that her husband will stop nagging her to earn some money; her boss there is a high-school student, whom she makes out with in her car, parked in front of his mother’s house. In “Friends with Money,” Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) has quit her job as a teacher and started cleaning houses. She steals seventy-five-dollar face cream from a client and rubs it on her feet; at night, she smokes pot and compulsively calls the married man who jilted her, hanging up when he says hello. Her friend Jane (Frances McDormand) is so racked with perimenopausal ennui that she gives up on washing her hair: “What’s the point? It just gets dirty.” Furies overcome Jane in the most anodyne circumstances—at the farmers’ market, in the checkout line at Old Navy—where she attacks the baffled people (“with their stupid fucking faces”) whom she perceives as her tormentors. “It’s so gratifying to be able to play a character that’s not controlled by some idea of getting an audience’s sympathetic reaction,” McDormand said.
Holofcener is fifty-eight, a slim, small woman with long reddish-brown hair who dresses like an unusually clean teen-age boy: jeans, sneakers, striped T-shirts, corduroy jackets. She likes to complain that nobody has seen her films. “People have never heard of me,” she told me. “I go to a party and say, ‘I direct movies.’ ‘Anything I might have seen?’ I tell them, and . . . nothing.” But her films are beloved by those who identify with heroines whose humor, intellect, and sex appeal are offset by aimlessness, self-sabotage, and alternating strains of wickedness and remorse. “She’s tender about people who do hideous things,” Keener, who has been in all five of Holofcener’s films, said. “She looks and she sees that that’s just . . . us.” Even when Holofcener’s protagonists try to be good, they often find unnerving evidence that they’re actually bad. In “Please Give,” Keener’s character—a conscience-stricken dealer of mid-century-modern furniture that she buys from children of the recently deceased—leaves a restaurant and offers her leftovers to an elderly African-American man standing outside. “Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Are you hungry? Would you like this?” He looks at her, aghast, and replies, “I’m waiting for a table.”
Even Holofcener’s most conventional film, the romantic comedy “Enough Said,” is primarily about a woman’s bad behavior and internal struggle when she is confronted with the possibility of romance. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a divorced masseuse named Eva who accidentally befriends the ex-wife of her new boyfriend, Albert (James Gandolfini). Instead of admitting the relationship, she proceeds to milk the ex-wife for information about Albert’s faults. Eva is a Machiavelli of the heart: avoiding the agony of another failed love justifies whatever duplicity is necessary. “I could completely understand where this bad instinct of hers was born,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “And that’s due to Nicole’s very profound writing.”
Often, movies are about people confronting extraordinary problems and overcoming them. Holofcener’s films tend to be about people confronting ordinary circumstances and falling short—because they are afraid of getting hurt, or of getting old, or simply of changing. Her protagonists evolve by the end of the story, but just barely. McDormand’s character washes her hair. Jennifer Aniston’s quits cleaning houses, though it’s unclear what she’ll do next. Progress is incremental, ambiguous, tenuous. “Life moves like that,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “Except in cataclysmic moments. But even then—it’s sort of these strange little baby steps.”
One evening, Holofcener went for dinner in Westwood with her best friend since high school, Madeleine Moskowitz. They had picked a restaurant called Pomodoro, which felt like it could be on the Upper West Side: garlic bread, baked ziti, women with no discernible plastic surgery. Seated at a table, Moskowitz talked about when they first met. “I think there was a connection between us, because our fathers had a lot in common: sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” she said. Her father was a computer researcher who grew rich in the nascent PC industry; Holofcener’s stepfather was Charles Joffe, a film producer and talent agent. “My dad made a lot of money and had a second childhood,” Moskowitz said. “And your dad was the same way. So we had kind of similar backgrounds, except yours was more Hollywood.”
Holofcener raised her eyebrows. “I got stoned with Jack Nicholson at your father’s house. You can’t say I was more Hollywood.”
Holofcener was born into a creative family in New York: her mother, Carol, is a set decorator, and her father, Lawrence, was a painter, a sculptor, and an occasional Broadway lyricist. They split up when Holofcener was a year old, and afterward Lawrence moved around New Jersey, renovating dilapidated houses and selling them. Carol raised Nicole and her older sister Suzanne on the Upper West Side. “She was a single mom, no money,” Holofcener said. “And then we met Charlie.”
Charles Joffe was an eminent figure in the entertainment industry; his clients included Robin Williams, David Letterman, Dick Cavett, and Billy Crystal. On a wall in Holofcener’s house, she has a framed picture of Jackie Gleason signed “To Charles, a producer and the ultimate in courage,” and another of her, as a child, sitting alongside Ed Sullivan. After her mother married Joffe, the family moved to Los Angeles. “It was like living the good life,” Holofcener said. “There’s an orange tree in our back yard! There’s a pool! It was a kid paradise.” Her mother remembers it differently. “Nicole had this huge guilt thing about leaving her father,” she said. “She became really depressed about it, even though it wasn’t her choice. Oh, she feels very guilty, that one. She grew up with a lot of feelings of not being worthy or being too lucky.”
I asked Holofcener and Moskowitz what they were like as teen-agers. “Depressed,” they replied in unison.
“I think we were really influenced by the times and that we watched all those Woody Allen movies and it was like, Oh-h-h, we’re so neurotic,” Moskowitz, who is now a psychoanalyst, said. “Like, we really embraced a whole fucked-up—”
“I don’t agree,” Holofcener interjected. “We were thoughtful, scared, smart girls. What’s not to be depressed about?”
“Do you remember when we called Warren Beatty on the phone?” Moskowitz asked.
“Now, that I really remember. We were so giddy with the possibility that we were going to have a threesome with Warren Beatty.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t remember—he probably gets a million of those calls,” Moskowitz said. “What were we thinking?”
“We were bored,” Holofcener said. “And depressed.”
Critics have called Holofcener “the female Woody Allen,” noting that the two directors, both Jewish, explore a milieu disproportionately populated by writers, artists, and shrinks. Holofcener insists that Allen had no more influence on her work than any other great filmmaker of the era, but he did play a significant role in her family. Joffe was the executive producer of many of Allen’s films between 1969, when “Take the Money and Run” was released, and 2009, when he died. When “Annie Hall” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, in 1978, Joffe accepted the statue. After Jack Nicholson announced the winner, Joffe leaped to his feet and hugged Holofcener, a giddy teen-ager in a pink dress. Holofcener’s mother was nominated for two Academy Awards, as the set decorator for “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Radio Days.” At her wedding to Charles Joffe, the reception doubled as the wrap party for “Take the Money and Run,” in which Holofcener was an extra. “He was a family friend,” Holofcener said of Allen, with a shrug, “who used to be funny and jokey with us.”
At the restaurant, Holofcener mentioned the allegations of sexual abuse against Allen: “People keep asking me, ‘Did he do it? Did he do it?’ How should I know!” She took a bite of pasta and chewed thoughtfully. “You know, Woody Allen did crack a lollipop over my head, which was really traumatic. I had one of those big twisted rainbow lollipops on the set, and he was, like, ‘You like that lollipop?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And he took it from me and cracked it over my head, and everybody laughed. I was, like, nine. I tried really hard not to cry.”
Moskowitz shook her head. “Not nice to make a kid the butt of your joke.”
“But I also had a big personality and acted like things wouldn’t bother me,” Holofcener said.
“Everything bothered you!” Moskowitz yelped. “When we went to see ‘American Werewolf in London,’ she had to leave!”
“I had a panic attack,” Holofcener admitted. “Also during ‘Last Tango in Paris’—I couldn’t bear it. I had to run out.”
Despite her upbringing, Holofcener never imagined that she would become a director. “I knew some women did it,” she said. “But it didn’t occur to me that I could have such a powerful job. I just set my sights lower.” After graduating from high school, she went to Sonoma State University, intending to be a painter. “My mom said I was, you know, great,” she told me. “Then I went to art school—and compared to what other people could do? I was, like, I’m getting out of here.” Holofcener moved to San Francisco and started taking film classes. “They were so much fun: I took a class just on Buñuel.” She laughed. “When I should have been graduating from college, I decided I wanted to get serious about film. I’d had two years at Sonoma, and then the two at San Francisco State, and then—my poor parents—I applied to the N.Y.U. film department as an undergrad, and I went for two years there. My stepdad said, ‘Go for it, we believe in you. At least for now.’ ”
At N.Y.U., Holofcener made her first film, about Lawrence’s second marriage. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life,” she said. “I used to wish I’d get hit by a car, because I was in so far over my head. I’d be crossing the street, thinking, Come on, hit me!” Her anxiety was so acute that she was often afraid she’d vomit. “When that film was done, it was bad—and I didn’t know!” she said. During a screening, she heard a friend seated a few rows behind her say, “When will this end?” She laughed, remembering. “My dad, Charlie, who had unfortunately spent six years supporting my artistic endeavors, said something like ‘Maybe you should think about another career.’ I thought, O.K., maybe I’m just going to be a writer. I can stay home and write, and if I have to throw up I’m near the bathroom.”
As it happened, focussing on home—family, intimacy, domesticity—has been at the core of Holofcener’s success as a director. From the beginning, her humor has been sharpest when trained on the intricacies of relationships—what makes them both maddening and indispensable. One of her early short films, “Angry,” begins with the words “Last week, I broke up with my mother.” Holofcener stars as a version of herself, a lonely single girl fed up with her mother’s criticism. “Are you still seeing that guy?” the mother asks. “Who doesn’t have any feelings—or pretends he doesn’t—and always hurts and frustrates you?” It was not much of a stretch. “My mother used to call my boyfriends losers, and I would defend them so much, because I felt that she didn’t see the other side of them,” Holofcener said. Asked if some of them were, in fact, losers, Holofcener said, “Totally. My twenties were rough: a lot of dicks. Well, a lot of jerks, I should say. Not, you know, a lot of dicks.” She seems to remember many of her romances with a combination of exhaustion and horror. “They weren’t nice to me,” she continued. “They didn’t have a job. They did too many drugs. There was this one who was in a band, and he was just the sexiest guy on the planet, and for some reason my mom met me at his apartment and he didn’t have sheets on the bed. She still talks about it—‘the one without the sheets.’ ”
Carol Joffe admitted, “I wasn’t good at the way I criticized. If I felt like she should do this or that, I’d say so.” This applied to her daughter’s work as well as to her personal life. In “Angry,” the mother tells the Holofcener character, after she reads one of her scripts, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I didn’t like any of the characters. The story just went on and on. Now that I’ve read this, I think I understand why people aren’t responding to your work.”
For a time, Holofcener refused to show her mother any of her writing, because she found her too negative. Nonetheless, Joffe said she thought “Angry” was very funny. It is only five minutes long, but it suggests what is to come from Holofcener: mordant humor, impeccable dialogue, an emphasis on female experience. It also hints at the kind of outré female sexuality that later animated “Broad City,” “Girls,” and “Sex and the City.” At one point, Holofcener’s character is lying in bed, just waking up, when her roommate comes in and tells her, “I hope you’re not mad, but Tom came over last night, and I borrowed your diaphragm. Don’t get all upset—I can return it in six hours.”
The script for Holofcener’s first feature, “Walking and Talking,” was more understated, but it, too, was about an intense relationship between two women. Holofcener began writing it not long after Madeleine Moskowitz had become engaged, to a writer. “They were two creatures from very disparate backgrounds finding each other,” Holofcener said. “There was something very beautiful and poetic about it. But as her best friend, watching it was just . . . disgusting.”
A young producer named Ted Hope read the script enthusiastically. Not long after, he formed a production company called Good Machine. “Suddenly, I was in the best hands in New York,” Holofcener recalled. Good Machine was the center of independent film in the early nineties, producing “The Ice Storm,” by Ang Lee, “Happiness,” by Todd Solondz, and “The Brothers McMullen,” by Edward Burns. “It felt doable,” Holofcener said. “Back then, you could make a movie for a million dollars, and it was a legitimate movie.” Still, it took six years and many combinations of actors and sources of financing before “Walking and Talking” began shooting.
In the interim, Holofcener moved to Los Angeles and married Ben Allanoff, an aspiring screenwriter whom she met at a party. Perhaps as important, she also met the person who would star in all her movies for the next decade. In 1991, she brought “Angry” to Sundance. There, she saw “Johnny Suede,” a rockabilly fantasia that featured an unknown actress named Catherine Keener. “It’s a cliché, but she seemed lit from within. And everything that she said was unique—she said it in a unique way, and she had a great voice,” Holofcener said. “She was so beautiful, in a way that I could relate to. She was an aspirational version of myself.”
“Walking and Talking” was shot in 1996, with Keener in what Holofcener calls “the me role.” Anne Heche was a version of Moskowitz, a therapist on the verge of marriage. “What struck me as different was that the friendship was equal—the representations of character were equal,” Keener said. “She takes these people who would be relegated to the background and brings them into the fore.” “Walking and Talking” feels, in some ways, like a period piece now, a relic of a time when a young woman could have a job selling classified ads, frequent a video store, and have a romance thwarted by something her best friend says on the answering machine about the “ugly guy” who happens at that very moment to be walking around her apartment in his boxers. What remains current is Holofcener’s precise writing about the sense of abandonment that you feel when an intimate pushes ahead in life without you.
To Holofcener’s surprise, people around her saw her as the one who was pushing ahead. Moskowitz told me, “I was jealous of her when she made that movie—I was afraid things would change. But they didn’t at all.” (“Yeah,” Holofcener said, “because I didn’t get that famous.”) While the movie was shooting, Holofcener’s husband made a short film of his own, “What About Me?,” a comedy that addressed his envy of his wife’s career. The next year, Holofcener and Allanoff had twin sons; five years later they divorced.
Now it is Holofcener’s turn to support the artistic aspirations of the young. Her son Gabe, who is studying at Emerson College, wants to be a music journalist. He FaceTimed her one evening from his dorm room and said he’d spent the day working on a new piece of music. “I did it on my computer, like a millennial youth,” he explained, smirking. Then he played a very strange and discordant collection of sounds, which cracked them both up. After they hung up, Holofcener complained about his mustache: “He looks like he’s in a gang.”
Gabe’s brother Joe dropped out of Temple University, and now lives in Mar Vista. He writes screenplays and works as a production assistant, sometimes for Holofcener. Recently, they were together on a set at Queens College, which had been transformed into the fictional Broder State University for the pilot of “Mrs. Fletcher,” an HBO show based on the novel by Tom Perrotta. They were shooting a scene in which the title character, played by Kathryn Hahn, brings her son to freshman orientation. Holofcener was covered with name tags that had fallen off the extras. “Someone just came up to me and said, ‘What do you do here?’ ” she told me. “ ‘Um, I’m the director. See all these people?’ ” She motioned to the fifty or so members of the cast and crew, waiting for the sound technicians to finish adjusting the microphones. “ ‘I’m in charge. I’m the big cheese.’ ”
After Holofcener called action, Hahn wheeled an enormous container full of pillows and Doritos and lacrosse sticks up a path to a dorm, walking with Jackson White, the actor playing her son. Another young man, portraying a dorm monitor, told her that she had to go move her car, which was parked illegally. Hahn pleaded with him to let her stay: “I need to help him unpack—I’m a single parent, and this is a really big deal for us.” Her son reassured her that he’d be fine.
Holofcener called cut and instructed White to sound more embarrassed by his mother. “Shut her up,” she directed. Her own son, Joe, a wiry guy with dark, curly hair who was wearing blue sneakers and a fanny pack, said that it was a convincing evocation of when Holofcener dropped him off at Temple. “Except I was nice to her,” he said. Between takes, he rubbed his mother’s shoulders.
“When they were both gone for college, that was a pretty scary time for me,” Holofcener admitted. “It’s really a reckoning—the next chapter and all that crap.” She started exploring her empty-nest anxiety several years before her kids actually left. “I was preparing myself,” she explained. “I worry in advance.” In “Enough Said,” the romance between Eva and Albert begins with their shared despondence about their daughters going to college. “It’s all I have,” Albert says when he meets Eva at a party. “Me, too,” she says, with an uncomfortable laugh of recognition.
Holofcener recently ended a fifteen-year relationship with Robert Frazen, who has edited all her films since “Lovely and Amazing.” They still talk frequently; there are pictures of him around her house. She is not looking forward to dating, as it will require temporarily abandoning her priorities, which she lists as “napping, bed, blankets, kitty cat.” If she could, she said, “I’d rather just skip forward to the relationship.”
For now, Holofcener’s intimacy requirements are met by Moskowitz and their group of friends, along with her mother and her sister, and her sons, to whom she is very close. “But don’t get me wrong—they’re assholes,” she said. “There are times I want to kill myself, they’re so mean to me.” Being a mother, she said, is “like you’re a prisoner,” so acutely do you feel every moment of your child’s pain. “It’s anguish,” she said. “To let them be who they are. To let them have . . . a mustache.”
One afternoon, Holofcener drove to a subsidized-housing complex in Baldwin Hills, to pick up three young siblings, whom she has been mentoring for the past seven years. She met the family volunteering with an organization called School on Wheels that offers tutoring to homeless children, which paired her with a red-headed five-year-old named Savanna. “She couldn’t even talk to me, she was so shy,” Holofcener recalled. Her siblings—Hanna, eight, and Nick, three—were less restrained. “The other two were all over me. ‘Take us here! Take us there! We never go anywhere!’ ” Holofcener said. “They all drank enormous amounts of soda—it made my jaw drop. I used to try and be the good example and not let them have it, but you should have seen their faces. It was like they were being punished.”
During my visit, she brought them to Canter’s Deli, and ordered them Sprites, chocolate milks, chicken fingers, and chocolate-chip pancakes; the manager sent rugelach for free. Holofcener pointed out the booth where she used to sit with her stepfather and Robin Williams, but none of the kids had heard of him. “ ‘Jumanji’?” Holofcener said. “ ‘Night at the Museum’?” They looked at her blankly. But Hanna, at least, seemed to have taken an interest in the film business: she was writing a screenplay, about a troubled family. “The dad isn’t around and the mom is on drugs,” she said, pecking away at her phone.
Sometimes Holofcener takes the kids to get their nails done, or to smash around in bumper cars, but that afternoon they went to play with rescue dogs at a pet store in Hollywood called Bark n’ Bitches. The space had a gamy smell, and there was a terrific amount of noise: barking, scuffling, scratching, squealing. “I would pick the saddest one,” Holofcener said, looking over a dozen mangy dogs. “The legless one who is ugly.”
“Oh, I want this one!” Savanna, a freckled girl in a “Peanuts” sweatshirt, said, as she tried to scoop up a black puppy that kept squiggling out of her hands. Hanna, bored, asked if she could go walk around outside.
After Holofcener dropped the kids back in Baldwin Hills, I mentioned that I had asked Hanna what her favorite activity with Holofcener was, and she had told me about a Boogie wit da Hoodie concert. “She picked something I just paid for and drove her to,” Holofcener said ruefully. “It was her first concert as a teen-ager, independent, with her friend, so I can understand that.” She sighed. “It’s just funny when my personality rears its head in this situation—which of course it does, because I’m not a robot or Mother Teresa.” She recalled how frustrated she had been when she took the kids out for Savanna’s birthday. “It’s never enough for her,” she said. “I bought her a pair of hundred-dollar sneakers, and as we were walking out of the store she said, ‘I know what I want for Christmas.’ ”
In her life and her work, Holofcener espouses the view that helping those who are worse off is both irresistible and futile. Emily Mortimer’s character in “Lovely and Amazing” keeps adopting ragged mongrels, until finally one bites her in the face. Keener’s in “Please Give” invites a homeless woman into her apartment to take a shower and the woman defecates on the floor. Holofcener seems to almost delight in charitable impulses that explode in the do-gooder’s face, but she doesn’t blame her characters for being misguided. Hers is the empathic but neutral take of the therapist: generosity, in her world, is as much a coping mechanism as lashing out. “I’ve always liked to volunteer,” she said. “It relieves my guilt.”
Holofcener told me that she inherited her altruism from her mother: “She has a bleeding heart. One time, she said, ‘Let’s go sing Christmas carols in a mental hospital!’ I couldn’t get through a song. I was in the hallway, sobbing. It was like, boy, I’m really cheerful—I’m really helping.”
When Carol Joffe was fifty-three, she adopted an African-American foster child, an infant named Cory. “People would always say to me, ‘He’s so lucky to have you,’ ” Joffe told me. “I’d say, ‘He’s not lucky! He was abandoned!’ ” Holofcener and her sister Suzanne were both in their thirties at the time, and, as Cory grew up, Holofcener was fascinated and pained by the challenges he faced. “How could it not be hard to be raised in a family of white Jewish women who are thirty years older than you? I know my brother absolutely wanted to look like us—as any child would. My mom tried to help him through it. I remember she put him in African-dance classes and put pictures of beautiful black people around the house, which I thought was kind of obvious and lame. But mostly we just tried to make him feel like he was a part of the family he was a part of.”
The relationships between a white woman, her two grown daughters, and their adopted black sibling became the subject of “Lovely and Amazing,” Holofcener’s most wrenching film. In one scene, the adopted daughter (played with cheek and poignancy by Raven Goodwin) tells her mother while she’s taking a bath, “I want to tear my skin off.” An acquaintance tells one of the daughters, “Your mother must be a saint!” The daughter, played by Keener, replies, “She did it for herself. She was lonely.”
“People got upset for me, because they thought that was me, but it was not me!” Joffe said. “Cory was upset, like, ‘She made me a fat little black girl.’ ”
“I can’t say that it didn’t get a little bumpy with family members when I made that movie,” Holofcener said. “I know some directors are, like, I don’t care, or—what’s that Nora Ephron line? ‘Everything is copy’? Well, yes. And I have taken some risks that might hurt some people’s feelings, and I’ve been lucky I didn’t. But with that one I did a little bit.”
One evening, Holofcener was the guest of honor at a seminar for aspiring directors at Film Independent, in West Hollywood. A dozen twentysomethings sat in a windowless room, eating tortilla chips and talking about movies that they were trying to make. A young man from Australia, who was working on a film about a woman who sees Jesus on a pair of swim trunks, asked how she deals with difficult actors. “James Gandolfini was very insecure about playing a leading man,” Holofcener said. “He was kind of giving me some guff, like, ‘You really want me to say that?’ One day, I went to his trailer and said, ‘I feel like you don’t trust me.’ And then all of his insecurities—his weight and his blah blah blah—came out. He was afraid that he would make himself ridiculous because he’s so emotional: like the scene where they break up and he’s starting to cry, he said, ‘You made me look like a bitch in the kitchen!’ So I’d say, ‘You look just right. This is just right.’ And then it was fine. When he did it again occasionally, Julia would hit him and say, ‘Listen to her. She knows what she’s doing.’ ”
Holofcener’s actors describe her presence on set as direct and calm. “Nicole has a high degree of emotional intelligence,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “You know, directors, a lot of them, can be complete douches.” At the seminar, Holofcener watched a pair of actors perform a scene from one of their films: a young woman holding an imaginary baby follows a young man into his imaginary basement, where she is taking refuge for the night. There was an almost unbearable amount of dead silence in between the lines, which were delivered strangely slowly. Holofcener quietly suggested to the director that, as the characters’ intimacy builds, the actors should speed up and move closer together. The director took in the advice, then announced, “Let’s change the pacing and work with the space more.” The second rendition was very much like the first. Holofcener told the director, “When you say, ‘Work with the space more,’ I think that’s the kind of thing actors hear and are, like, ‘Wha?’ Just tell them, ‘Try moving closer.’ ”
Sometimes Holofcener’s compassion can feel like a professional handicap—a sideways-flying cat limb that she has to hop around with on set. “Please Give” opens in a radiology office, with breast after breast—young, old, black, white, huge, tiny, saggy, turgid—laid out on a mammogram machine, in a display of realism unlike any other cavalcade of boobs in cinema. But Holofcener sees it as a compromise. “If I was a male director, you know those mammogram machines would have squeezed the shit out of those tits!” she said, and shrugged. “I wanted that—but I couldn’t pull that off without hurting fifteen women.”
Her job is usually to create emotional rather than physical pain, and that she can do—just. “I put myself in these situations,” Holofcener said, shaking her head. “I know when I’m writing them it’s not going to be pleasant to direct them. But what’s the point of making these movies if I can’t face what they’re about?” She recalled the scene in “Please Give” in which Keener’s character misguidedly offers her leftovers to the man outside the restaurant. “I had to talk to this guy who has one line in the movie and say, ‘So, she thinks you’re homeless . . . black man,’ ” she said. “He was O.K., of course. He’d read it, and he wants to do it. And I guess he knows she’s being made a fool of—that there are stupid white people. But still.” (The actor in that scene, Arthur French, told me that Holofcener was overthinking things: “I don’t remember feeling anything negative about her or the actress saying it. I remember thinking, It’s something that happens.”)
In another part of that film—inspired by Holofcener’s crying jag at the mental hospital where she went carolling with her mother—Keener’s character looks into volunteering at a program for kids with Down syndrome. But, instead of joining in the children’s joy as they run basketball drills, she cries uncontrollably—“I’m sorry, it’s just so sad”—and is asked to leave. “I was very anxious that day,” Holofcener said. “I had to have her cry in front of them because she pitied them so much.” The kids didn’t share her concern. “They didn’t give a shit what was happening,” she recalled. “They were excited to be playing basketball.”
Holofcener’s critics complain that not much happens in her films. As a reviewer in the Guardian once argued, “By keeping her scenes short and jumping constantly between her protagonists, Holofcener creates an illusion of momentum.” Even devoted fans like Frances McDormand concede, “She’s not great on plot, but nobody can touch her on character and dialogue.”
In Holofcener’s new film, however, plenty happens: a child dies, a romance commences, a cigar is stubbed out on a forehead. For the first time, the protagonist is a man: Anders, played by the charismatic Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn. (When I raised this with Holofcener, she protested, “But Ben is like a woman.”) The film is based on “The Land of Steady Habits,” a novel by Ted Thompson, and, instead of being set in New York or Los Angeles, it takes place in a sylvan Connecticut town, a land of commuter trains and family Christmas cards. In the film, Anders has quit his job and left his wife (Edie Falco), moving out of the grand brick house where they raised their son and into a deflationary condo. He’s living more or less the same life as before, but lonelier and less comfortable.
The themes are still very much Holofcener’s. There is guilt and regret: Anders yearns for his old life, which he dismantled in a spurt of late-middle-aged dissatisfaction. There is aimlessness: Anders has retired, perhaps prematurely, from his job in finance; his twenty-seven-year-old son, despite having a degree from Northwestern, can’t figure out anything to do besides deliver liquor. And there is the urge for validation that brings a series of depressed divorced women into Anders’s bed for an inadequate shag. “Those scenes were hard to shoot,” Holofcener said. “It’s hard to direct lonely, banging sex. The actors have done this a lot, but I’m so protective. Like, ‘Are you O.K.? Are you O.K.?’ ”
“The Land of Steady Habits” is more eventful than her earlier films, but it is still, as Holofcener put it, “a small story, a sad story—a sad, small story.” Vast sums of money do not tend to accrue to stories of that description, so Holofcener sometimes directs episodes of television shows and commercials. Her life is not opulent, but it is expensive. She has been the breadwinner for her sons; she drives a Prius; she lives in a neighborhood where stores sell outrageously priced health beverages—“juice flecked with gold and uterus.”
“I mean, I’d like to have more money to make these films,” Holofcener said, in her living room, sitting in an Eames chair that was a gift from Moskowitz and her husband. “I always say, ‘I don’t care.’ Then, later, I wish I had more, and I feel like, Am I in show business? But I can’t help liking the kind of movies I like—even though I try.” Holofcener stood, and headed to the laundry room, where she keeps a collection of “sad ladies”—vintage paintings and drawings of women whose expressions range from forlorn to miserable. She loves them, but to keep them in the main part of the house might make visitors uncomfortable. ♦
An earlier version of this article described Charles Joffe as the producer of all of Allen’s films between 1969 and 2009. Allen’s films had other producers during that forty-year period. It also incorrectly stated that Carol Joffe’s two Academy Award nominations were for art direction; the nominations were for set decorating.
