Two small screen titans, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini, team for a rueful — at times acerbic — comedy of mature love and love in “Enough Said,” writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s strongest movie since “Lovely & Amazing.”
Back in Los Angeles after the Manhattan shenanigans of her 2010 “Please Give,” Holofcener posits Nina (Lous-Dreyfus) as a masseuse who makes house calls and Albert (Gandolfini) as a TV archivist in something like the Museum of Broadcasting. Both are divorced, both have college-age daughters poised to leave the nest for schools in New Yawk, and both (naturally, given their professions) are possessed with the gift of sitcom banter.
Physically, Nina and Albert make an interesting pair. She’s a sad little figure, schlepping her massage table from one client to the next, as he peers out warily from behind his bulk. She’s hyper expressive. He’s twinkly and deadpan. She’s too nosy, he’s a bit of a slob. Their gender stereotypes are further reinforced by her insecurity and his tendency towards over confidence. Having made a mess of the subject in her weakest film, “Friends with Money,” Holofcener seemingly has little interest in the real issues of money and status that would plague her protagonists. Their cartoon chemistry and their respective neediness is crucial in that “Enough Said” makes a serious (albeit funny) statement about the ways in which projected appearance trumps subjective experience. (There’s a sense in which the entire movie is a gloss on the famous scene in “Lovely & Amazing” in which Emily Mortimer’s aspiring actress stands naked before her lover asking him to critique her physical flaws until, amply cued, he finally validates her specific body issue.)
“Enough Said” is cute but restrained, despite the plethora of age jokes. The twist, embodied in the person of Holofcener’s axiom Catherine Keener (less a character than a textual effect), is not exactly Shakespearean, but it does give the movie its most uneasy humor as well as some unexpected depth. So too, the recent death of James Gandolfini, which burnishes Holofocener’s bittersweet fable with unavoidable intimations of mortality. Mutatis mutandis, you watch it in something of the way that a 1955 teenager would have taken in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
