Friends With Money Starring Jennifer Aniston

The 10-season American sit-com Friends remains my all-time favorite. Rachel, portrayed by Jennifer Aniston, is fondly regarded by many as an attractive home-coming queen, blessed with beauty, style, character and love.

“Friends with Money”, also starring Jennifer Aniston, depicts a girl named Olivia, trapped in a set of dramatically different circumstances.

Olivia finds teaching 11th graders intolerable and ends up being a cleaning lady. In sharp contrast, her rich friends attend charity events and dine at expensive restaurants regularly.

As far as I can see, none of Olivia’s rich and married friends live a much happier life. As a matter of fact, I find the movie a bit depressing. One of the married women stops shampooing her hair and looks like a total hag at 40 plus.

It’s a sad but true that some married women stop caring about how they look at some point. As a Chinese saying goes, “A woman dolls herself up for the man that pleases (appreciates) her.” When the man stops pleasing and appreciating the woman, it’s not unlikely for a woman to stop dolling herself up.

The married woman may grumble, “What’s point of looking pretty when no one’s looking at me?” It’s all too easy to surrender to time and gravity and to be buried by endless chores and trivialities.
In my opinion, whatever the circumstances, a woman should never give up on herself, including her looks.

Olivia, though single, is not much better off. Emotionally, she still hangs on to the married man she’s dated for two months. Financially, she’s in a pickle as well. She goes from store to store, collecting free LANCOME samples.

What’s more distressing is that she keeps dating a shameless guy who tags along when she does her cleaning jobs, and who has the gall to ask for his cut of money for helping her clean a little. A man like that is absolutely despicable and beyond redemption. I personally would dump such a cheap loser at the drop of a hat. Intelligent and beautiful, Olivia apparently sells herself too short by letting the cheapskate take advantage of her.

When Olivia finally comes to her senses and breaks away from the cheapskate and the dead-end cleaning job, she moves on to date a fat and seemingly unemployed man who used to hire her to clean his house at a bargain price. Olivia believes that it takes just one person to be the right one and is willing to give him a shot. It turns out that the fat man has inherited a fortune from his father and does not work by choice. Olivia asks why he bargains with her over peanuts while he has a lot of money. He replies, “I have issues. You know, people, issues…” Olivia murmurs to herself dreamily, “It’s OK. I have my issues, too.” Thus ends the movie.

Personally, I find the ending a bit disturbing. “Friends with Money” is definitely not a fairytale in which Cinderella finds her rich and generous prince and lives happily ever after. Olivia’s rich “prince” is someone who bargains with a poor cleaning maid. Is he really a prince with a good heart or just a toad with dysfunctional issues? A man who cannot give is a man who’s incapable of true love.

When it comes to men with money, I’d rather choose a man with ten dollars who’s willing to spend nine dollars on me, over a millionaire who’s willing to spend only 100 dollars on me. It’s not the amount of money, but the amount of love that counts!