Please Give

Bear with me. It’s been a while since I saw “Please Give.” I probably shouldn’t be writing this review. Bad me!!!

Tell ya what: I’ll just start off by telling you the most offensive thing about “Please Give.” A married man has an affair. He never tells his wife about it, either. I hope that wasn’t a spoiler.

I actually cringed when the guy was initiating the affair. Why? Because I liked him. I liked him and his wife. They are decent people who are forced to be macabre in their professional and personal lives. They work as antique dealers. They get their stuff by buying up the estates of the recently deceased. Then they mark the items up and sell them at their store. How would you like a career like that? “Dear God, please make lots of people die today so that I can eat.” Good grief.

The couple, along with their teenaged daughter, live in an apartment. Next door is a selfish old lady who won’t leave. The antique-dealing couple is actually hoping the lady will die soon, so they can buy her apartment and make a larger living space. There’s another ethical quagmire to live through: Needing someone to die so you can progress in life.

I’m a Christian, and that means that I see things in black and white. Abortion: Murder. Gay marriage: Abomination. So I kinda like it when a movie can make me see things in shades of gray. In this case, I don’t know if the couple is being selfish or not. I mean, I hate the guy for cheating on his wife, but the wife is a lovable sort. She’s the kind of woman who hands $20 bills to homeless people on the street.

Her daughter even tells an embarrassing story about what happened when she allowed a homeless woman to come into her apartment to take a shower. I probably can’t share that story here because this is, after all, a Christian movie review site.

I’ll just say that “Please Give” has some profanity, but, at least, it’s not forced. It’s real.

The movie is real, in fact. It shows people trying to make sense of the ethical dilemmas that greet us all in everyday life.

For this Christian moviegoer, one thought keeps popping up in my mind whenever I go to the cinema. It is this: “I wonder what choices these characters would make if they worshiped Jesus.”

Violence: None / Profanity: Moderate / Sex/Nudity: Moderate

See list of Relevant Issues—questions-and-answers.