FRIENDS With Money is a film with Jennifer Aniston in it. Not to be confused with FRIENDS a sitcom with Jennifer Aniston in it. In FRIENDS With Money Aniston plays the FRIEND of three other women, all of whom in some way or other are pretty well off. In FRIENDS she played a ditzy lovelorn character who only really exist in sitcoms, you know the type who get “accidentally married”. The question in FRIENDS With Money is can people of different financial standings be FRIENDS. The question in FRIENDS was how long can they spin this successful sitcom from (and does anyone really have FRIENDS like that).
Actually Friends With Money resembles Sex In The City more than Friends. Clearly as its leads are four female friends who regularly get together to bitch. But crucially, Friends With Money is like Sex In The City ten years on, when the happy ever afters become unhappy, become snug, become supportive, or in Aniston’s case it doesn’t become anything. It uses humour to illustrate how discontent these people are, which seemed self-indulgent until another analogy threw itself at me. Friends With Money is also like Crash. Set in LA, it is a film about something you rarely see in cinema. The lives of forty-something women. Crash was po-faced about race, Friends With Money is almost as bad about oncoming menopause. Almost – because like Friends and Sex In The City it is also stuffed with good jokes, and saves itself a piece of hokey wish-fulfillment at the end which illustrates what a non-problem all these women have in the first place.
Still, I can’t help but thinking the film should have been sold on the Friends/Aniston connection.