The image in the one-sheet for this film shows the four actresses –Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand – in what looks like dress-up clothes found in a relative’s attic. From the lighting and windows behind them, they’re clearly in a warehouse. As strangely attired as they all are, they don’t really seem connected to one another by anything other than closeness in age.

As I followed the relationships in the film by writer-director Nicole Holofcener, I tried to figure out why these people liked each other. Or why anyone else would like them. They’re all, to varying degrees, if not outright unbearable in their neuroses, just not that interesting as human beings. Moreover, they don’t seem to really like one another. Some of the snippier dialogue is the characters all disparaging each other’s partners, presumed lack of sex, employment choices, ambition and, of course, hence the film’s title, money. The money, is only a superficial divider, though. It could just as easily have been called Friends with Contentment.

Even the characters in the film who have money seem not very content with their lives. The men of the film only seem to shadow the vague discontent of their wives, if with varying degrees of agreement or outright hostility.

Three of the women are coupled; it’s only Aniston’s Olivia, a teacher-turned-housecleaner, who is single. She spends her nights calling a married ex and hanging up and finishing a joint. The poorest of the group, she hoards samples cadged off Lancome counter sales clerks and utilizes the vibrator of one of her cleaning clients. Despite these oddities and the aforementioned obsessive hang-up calls, she’s probably the sanest of the quartet.

Cusack’s character stays home since she doesn’t have to work, but feels guilty enough about it to take offense when it’s pointed out that she has help. Though it’s mentioned that the money is Cusack’s, we see her turn over control of it to her husband, to the point that she asks him whether they should make a loan to Olivia. The husband (Greg Germann) isn’t above spending $90 on children’s shoes, but he not about to make a loan. If the female characters are all strangely compelled to remain friends despite their vivid differences as individuals, Germann and the other two husbands – Simon McBurney and Jason Isaacs – seem curiously impassive to their wives’ musings of how happy or not their friends really are.

One running joke is that the other women joke that McDormand’s clothes-loving husband, Aaron (McBurney) is gay (the film even gives him a ,doppelganger, another “metrosexual” man married to a wife who embodies more masculine traits). Yet, we see Aaron initiating sex and being understanding when McDormand declines sex. A successful designer, McDormand’s character spends much of the film doing the kind of venting that would put the Costanzas to shame. Going through what only can be called a mild depression at turning 43, she stops washing her hair and finally admits to Aaron that success makes her feel like “we’re just getting ready to die.”

There’s no way to really take this dialogue seriously. If we were to overhear these characters in public, we’d laugh or groan at how self-involved they are. Keener and McDormand, playing the more obviously shrill characters in the film are, inexplicably, given the weakest lines and even weaker character development. Having created another in a line of abrasive characters, Keener has no moment in the film that touches her hyper-absurd/angsty relationship with a teenager in Holofcener’s Lovely and Amazing.

The off-kilter here seems forced, such as when Keener and Isaacs, a screenwriting couple have an argument and Keener exclaims, with deliberate punch, “It’s like we’re both writing separate scripts.” We can’t be certain Holofcener feels much differently. In one scene, a character describes a film just seen: “I don’t think you’re supposed to get it. It’s deliberately confusing.”

It’s a perfect metaphor for a story about four women who don’t seem together for reasons any more compelling than they’re really not content in their lives. Maybe there’s a clue in a line from one of the soundtrack’s original songs by Rickie Lee Jones in which she professes, “I like the view in my head.”

That’s the problem with Holofcener’s film, ultimately. Films like this show the obvious limitations of self-reference, even more when the frame of that reference is so limited. If Holofcener and self-referential filmmakers like Neil LaBute and Todd Solendz want to illuminate us about us, then maybe they need to show us characters we might actually want to get to know.

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