Weighing in at a slender 88 minutes, Friends With Money resembles the women who populate it. While it often lacks dramatic ambition and weight, and settles for comfort and simplicity, the movie, like its characters, always charms with a keen intelligence, prickly wit and endearing authenticity.

With a stellar ensemble cast, Friends houses some engaging performances: A comically deadpan and warmly vulnerable Jennifer Aniston works well given her flimsy character; Joan Cusack, in an unfortunately underdeveloped role, successfully exploits her knack for the comedic; and Frances McDormand lets us laugh at the anger of aging in a textured performance. If you like any, or all, of these leading ladies, then Friends won’t disappoint. (Although, in an audience full of married 40-somethings, you may feel remarkably young.)

Unfortunately, this shallow dependency upon the performances makes Friends a bit superficial and insignificant. Rather than knitting a warm, compelling and provocative plot, director and writer Nicole Holofcener settles for an effort in observation. Not that every movie needs a sprawling story, but a sense of drama always helps, and Friends lacks that urgency.

Still, Friends has its fair share of winning scenes. Take, for example, a conversation between Aniston’s character and the man whose house she cleans. This brief talk distills the very theme that the film most successfully conveys, and it does so not only through performances, but also through a curiosity held both by the characters and the audience. This is the drama that the film too often overlooks.

Friends typifies an unfortunate result of meticulous but myopic care: Holofcener has made a movie out of memorable moments, but the architecture and construction of these moments amount to nothing. Friends settles into its ending, and into comfort, in the same way its characters settle: without good reason.