Enough Said is a very good realistic romantic comedy in which people act very much like people do in real life, and life rolls along at a nice steady pace without a lot of shouting and battle. And nobody makes operatic melodrama of incidents similar to what we all go through from time to time. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener knows people just the way they are, and likes them, warts and all.
A major theme in Enough Said is human communication, verbal and otherwise, in a lot of different kinds of situations: ones involving parent and child, parents and their children's friends, spouses, ex-spouses, new lovers, and general snoops and gossips.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is much given to communication with all manner of people, but she's careless enough to tell one of her teenage daughter's friends to have sex if she wants to, and she doesn't reflect enough on the hazards of consulting the ex-wife of her new love, James Gandolfini, about the peculiarities of living with him, without her letting Gandolfini or his ex know what she's doing. Lack of communication is also part of Holofcener's theme.
But most of the time all the characters in Enough Said talk to each other with a frankness I'm not sure would be easy to find in real life. And except for Gandolfini's harmless little lies, they stick pretty close to facts as they know them.
It is especially interesting to see a Hollywood movie that is about love and not just sex. In which, in fact, physical relations are almost completely neglected. No attempt is made to make Gandolfini, or Louis-Dreyfus, or Toni Collette, or Catherine Keener or anybody else pin-up pretty. It looks like a picture of real life and those who live it, and you don't see that very often on the big screen.
