REVIEWED - FRIENDS WITH MONEYTHE TITLE of Nicole Holofcener's enjoyable debut, Walking and Talking, offered clues as to what we might expect her characters to get up to. Lovely and Amazing, the charming follow-up, found another batch of neurotic urbanites gossiping while they meandered. They're at it again in Friends with Money, writes  Donald Clarke

Holofcener's latest film, whose first-rate cast deserve much of the credit for diverting the piece from drifting into navel-gazing torpor, focuses on the lives of four women in Los Angeles. Three are wealthy and married. One is neither of those things. By the film's close, certain personal dynamics have evolved, but, for the most part, the script gets by without recourse to plot. They perambulate. They communicate. Nobody gets shot.

Jennifer Aniston, allowed, for once, to display her ability to be likeably sat-upon in a worthwhile enterprise, appears as Olivia, a former teacher, reduced to working as a cleaning lady. Her friends - a scriptwriter, a dress designer and a cocooned homemaker - cannot decide whether to give her money or employ her. In the end they do neither.

It is to Holofcener's credit that she does not draw any glib conclusions as to what sort of miseries or consolations come with prosperity. As the film begins, Joan Cusack's Franny is facing an awful dilemma: to whom should she give her spare $2 million? Many directors would have felt obliged to pile a swath of guilty neuroses on such a character, but she is, in fact, the best adjusted of the bunch. Catherine Keener's Christine is falling out with her cold husband. Jane, played with magnificent fury by Frances McDormand, is waging a one-woman war against the little annoyances of modern life.

Olivia may be a little more miserable than Franny, but she is probably a tad cheerier than Christine. Once we have enough to eat and somewhere to live, the film seems to say, we then start working out our own characteristic ways of feeling deprived.

The film is buoyed up by sly dialogue and flawless performances, but the satirical edge does gradually begin to dull. Eventually, rather than being encouraged to snort at characters fretting over crises most of us would long to encounter, we are asked to feel their pain. This may be more than most viewers are willing to attempt.

A witty, insightful character piece, for all that.