Air America host Stephanie Miller went on a weird bender today in her attack on “the ‘Deliverance’ wing of the Republican Party.” She asserted that the new movie Friends With Money had an anti-immigration theme in it somehow, that Republicans had written it in: Jennifer Aniston plays a “maid,” and wasn’t it the point, she thought, that the filmmaker was saying that immigrants are stealing those maid jobs from the Americans? (Even her producers told her on air she was waaay overreaching.)
This is clearly not what Manohla Dargis of the New York Times thought. She felt the filmmaker was too mellow and cautious in her ambitions, but still saw a more liberal message coming through:
“Ms. [Nicole] Holofcener never suggests that her characters need to get out of the house and start ladling chowder down at the local soup kitchen; even the cars in this film don’t wear peace signs. But she obviously wants to say something about people who have too much of everything for their own good.”