REVIEW - ENOUGH SAID

Ah, just to be able to laugh. To laugh, and not to care about what your response signifies, about you or about what made you laugh. Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said is just funny like that. It's got a lot of perfect little one-liners, and a lot of perfectly-pitched performances, and that's an enormously winning combination. Boy, did it make me chuckle. And there's no overt hint of irony or sarcasm, slapstick or farce, nothing too meta, nothing too dark. So it lacks a little in distinctiveness, in a character that Holofcener's other films proudly bore, a slash of cutting acerbity here, a dash of dispiriting dejection there, a sensation that Holofcener is more than just another American indie quirk-mistress. At the least, Enough Said doesn't try anything particularly disturbing in style or content, even if it doesn't try anything much at all. But Holofcener's tried before, and she's talented enough to fall back on material as simple and easy as this without worry. Julia Louis-Dreyfus' characterisation approaches irritancy in its more self-aware, twee, perky touches, but her off-hand flair for comedy is joyous, and her laugh is revelatory - a laugh that feels, sounds and even looks natural, as though she were genuinely surprised to be so amused. Holofcener insists on passing comment on familiar issues of class, age, gender etc. which don't feel very fresh, but are consistently reliable fodder for her super dialogue. And that's beside the point anyway. The point is that Enough Said makes you laugh. And ah, just to be able to laugh.