'Friends with Money' explores elusive truth

By JAMI BERNARD
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
It's hard to imagine Jennifer Aniston cleaning other people's houses for a living, but that's what she does in "Friends With Money," a sharply observed comedy about four women in L.A. whose friendships are taxed by their neuroses and different social standings.
Aniston's character, Olivia, has such poor self-esteem that she cleans homes she wouldn't feel entitled to live in, occasionally pilfering face cream or treating herself to the stray sex toy she finds in a night stand.
Olivia hasn't gotten over the last married man who dumped her, and things aren't going much better with the new guy in her life, a personal trainer (Scott Caan) who makes her dress up in a French maid's outfit while she works.
Olivia's friends are better off financially, but not necessarily emotionally. Christine (Catherine Keener) writes screenplays with her adversarial husband while they both turn a blind eye to the neighborhood as they build a view-killing addition to their house. Jane (Frances McDormand) is an increasingly bitter fashion designer whose husband is almost surely gay, and she expresses her frustration by refusing to wash her hair. Franny (Joan Cusack) has struck it rich, but the money sits uneasily on her like a matted mink stole.
No one making movies today has as firm a grasp of the intricacies of female friendship as writer-director Nicole Holofcener ("Lovely & amp; Amazing"). With this movie, she explores that elusive truth -- that all relationships run on batteries of varying strengths and sizes. Money is the least of it.
At the same time, the four ladies of "Friends With Money" are people I wouldn't want to ride the bus with (not that some of them would be caught dead on public transportation). They're prisoners of their circumstances, mired in partnerships or professions that suit their modest purposes but give them scant pleasure.
They're whiners with little self-knowledge. Perhaps that's what holds them together, but it's not pretty.