Lovely and Amazing (15)

Women behaving sadly

In Nicole Holofcener's sprightly-sad comedy, Lovely and Amazing, three sisters are in turmoil with, in descending order, themselves, each other, and their mother. The strain of being in a family aggravates them, but for the moment they have to accept that these are still the nearest and dearest they've got. The last American film I saw about a trio of sisters was Todd Solondz's extraordinary Happiness, and while there's no attempt to match its incendiary material (paedophilia, rape, murder), Holofcener's film shares a spikiness of tone in its reckoning of personal insecurity and dissatisfaction.

It can be heard most insistently in Michelle Marks (Catherine Keener), who in her need to tell it like it is hardly notices how she hurts people. "I don't know why you're doing it," she says as her mother (Brenda Blethyn) nervously prepares for liposuction, "nobody's gonna see you naked anyway." Michelle makes cute little chair sculptures out of twigs and then fails to sell them to gift shops in Los Angeles. A one-time homecoming queen, she doesn't feel appreciated any more, and her snippy husband wears her down. "I've just been hearing that your brave wife gave birth without an epidural," says a friend. The husband deadpans: "She's phobic about medication." Her younger sister Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) is stuck in an unhappy relationship, too; her boyfriend (James Le Gros) patronises her profession (she's an actress) and dismisses her worries as trivial. Like her mother, she is insecure about her body, and imagines that her physical shortcomings (flabby upper arms) are holding back her career. The youngest sister Annie (Raven Goodwin) is black and adopted – and she worries over her hair.

Thus: the Marks sisters, as endearing as the Marx brothers and a lot better looking, if they only knew it. Holofcener isn't afraid to pile on the anxiety because she trusts her characters to dig their way out. "You won't understand this now," says Michelle to the junk food-munching Annie, "but being a fat teenager will not be any fun." Catherine Keener has played this abrasive queen bitch before, in Being John Malkovich and Your Friends and Neighbours, but she dilutes the acidity here with a somewhat plangent "lost" quality. So deeply does Michelle feel her most recent failure that she applies on a whim to the first Situation Vacant she sees – working in a one-hour photo shop. "No way," smiles the 17-year-old (Jake Gyllenhaal) behind the counter. "Why not?" she asks. "Because you look like my ma!" But he gives her the job anyway, and soon he's making eyes at her. "Don't look at me like that – you just said I looked like your ma." "My ma's cute," he replies, aceing her. Gyllenhaal does wonders in this small role, his huge blue eyes at once candid and innocent; he's the sort of actor for whom Cameron Crowe might one day write a really terrific part.

Emily Mortimer, previously shoehorned into ill-fitting minor roles, here inhabits the skittish actress to a T; easy to understand why she has a weakness for adopting stray dogs. Posing for a Vogue photo-shoot in a dress that's borderline pornographic, she says quietly, "I don't feel quite myself." "Who does?" replies the photographer. Mortimer doesn't milk this vulnerability, and she carries off one zinger of a scene quite beautifully. Having allowed herself to be seduced by a narcissistic Hollywood star (Dermot Mulroney), she hops out of bed and asks him to evaluate her limb by limb. The camera stares at her naked body, and you hold your breath as Mulroney, at first reluctant, delivers a fairly honest appraisal of what he sees from toe to top ("the bush needs a trim"); it's a sequence that might have hit so many wrong notes, yet Mortimer, by turns graceful and gawky, meets the gaze of the lens with a forthrightness that not many actors could carry off. It might well make her a star.

Holofcener, whose debut Walking and Talking (1996) made comic sparring partners of Catherine Keener and Anne Heche, has evidently spent the interim fine-tuning her skills (she directed several episodes of Sex and the City) and sharpening her ear for modern absurdities. Where else but Los Angeles would you hear talk of an actress doing a "chemistry read" for a TV soap? (The director wants to check if she'll be "hot" with the leading man.) While always likeable, it's not an unqualified success: Brenda Blethyn's fretful matriarch doesn't come through strongly enough, and one wonders if a woman who craves liposuction would have the emotional generosity to adopt an eight-year-old girl whose birth mother was a crack addict. Formally, there's a slightly baggy feel to it; Holofcener's admirable emphasis on character comes at the expense of crispness. I wanted at least one more scene between Michelle and her teen suitor, some acknowledgement that their fling, albeit doomed, wasn't actually a mistake. (Their moments together are the best in the movie.) And how satisfying it would have been to see Elizabeth's awful agent ("Your sister is a neurotic mess," she tells Michelle) suddenly grasp a sense of her own cold-hearted perfidy. Or perhaps that's what an agent thrives on – see ivans xtc.

The surprise of Lovely and Amazing is that, exasperating and self-absorbed as these women are, by the end you have a feeling that you'll miss them. I was going to say that they'd be ideal material for a TV sitcom, but then one of the abiding truths of sitcom characters is that they never change. What this film holds out, in a tentative, rueful sort of way, is the possibility that the Marks sisters will move on with their lives, that they'll cling to each other rather than to the habits of bitching and worrying and overeating. Now wouldn't that be lovely and amazing?