Prickly, disgruntled, bitingly witty — these aren’t traits you typically find in female film characters, who are most often written to be sympathetic and inviting.
Yet this is exactly the type of character that Nicole Holofcener, the writer-director behind favorites like “Friends with Money” and “Enough Said,” has devoted her career to creating.
Generally off-putting yet still strangely alluring, Holofcener’s characters are real and multidimensional, the type of person prone to lying and stealing and lashing out.
But even when the rest of these characters’ worlds are crumbling around them, they often cling to their friendships with fierce loyalty and love.Holofcener’s newest, “The Land of Steady Habits,” now available on Netflix, finds her turning her perceptive lens for the first time ever onto a male character: a divorced ex-banker named Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn).
Like many of her previous protagonists, Anders is irritable and aimless, having recently
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