Enough Said (2013)

Enough Said arrives from 2013, the fifth feature written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, and it concerns Eva, a divorced Los Angeles masseuse who takes up with Albert, a sweet and overweight man, while unknowingly befriending his ex-wife Marianne. The cast is uniformly white and comfortable: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, Toni Collette. The troubles on display are romantic and familial. Nobody in Pacific Palisades is worried about rent, and the screenplay offers no economic critique, no structural grievance, no larger frame. It is a film about salsa-scooping habits and the fear of an empty nest.

On the progressive ledger, the film registers faintly and honestly. A woman director centers a middle-aged woman and her friendship with another woman, which reads as a naturalistic character study instead of a manifesto. Weight enters the story when Eva finds herself unattracted to Albert's body and later comes around to it, a thread the film handles with grace and without a thesis. Race, sexuality, climate, neurodivergence, historical revision: all absent. So is any impulse to instruct. Holofcener's dialogue was widely praised for its naturalism, and the film watches its people instead of sermonizing at them.

The result is a grown-up movie, which was the phrase of the season, and a culturally inert one. It is warm, sharply acted, and entirely content to let its affluent Angelenos muddle through their feelings. James Gandolfini died before release, and the dedication in the credits carries more weight than any argument the film makes. We classify it as a small, humane, unpersuaded object. The taxonomy has little to say about it, and the film would prefer it that way.