With the micro-budgeted indies Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, writer-director Nicole Holofcener established herself as an astute chronicler of contemporary mores. Friends with Money, her third feature, continues the trend, examining an ensemble caught up in the anxious tumble-cycle of modern life, chafing against the combined stress and weight of notions of happiness and success largely prescribed by others. An amusing snapshot of class and the safe boundaries, attitudes and behavior that it sometimes enables, it’s a movie that embraces you with the warmth of real life, real characters and real complications.

Jennifer Aniston), single, broke and younger than her married friends. A former teacher, we’re told, she’s taken to working as a maid, if for no other reason than it doesn’t require much thought or effort, and it allows her indulge her recreational penchant for marijuana. A psychological and emotional doormat, Olivia takes up with Franny’s trainer, Mike (Scott Caan), a shallow mooch who shadows Olivia to her housecleaning gigs to screw her and loaf about, and then has the temerity to ask for a cut of the money, which she, of course, gives him.

Each couple frets about or harps on various combinations of one another, and to some degree begin to examine their own lives. Jane and her husband are both successful, but she’s still driven by a quiet, if comical, hair-trigger rage; stolen parking spaces and store line-jumping send her spinning off into apoplectic tizzies. Christine and David are building an addition to their house to maximize their sunset view, but may have reached a point of stasis in their relationship. Franny and her husband Matt (Greg Germann), meanwhile, are the most financially well-off of all, and indulge their children and themselves. A point of focus for all is Olivia, who drifts through her days obliviously, her greatest of-the-moment worry how to continue to indulge her fondness for an expensive skin cream on her current meager wages.

Friends with Money sings with the vim of Holofcener’s righteous observational powers. The film wonderfully captures the way many couples bond through the casual denigration of others, especially supposed friends. It’s spot-on in its distracted patter, and the men and women alike — though some of the former are a bit thinly sketched — generally give as good as they get. When David rightly assays Christine’s hysteria in one scene, she shoots back, “You always do that — just so you can remove yourself enough to feel superior, so you don’t have to feel or be affected.” That you simultaneously feel both points of view are correct is a credit to Holofcener’s gift for charged banter. If there’s an overarching criticism or problem here, it’s that Olivia doesn’t feel quite a necessity in this story. Truth be told, she’s the least interesting character of the bunch, and this has far less to do with Aniston’s performance than the fashion in which she’s written, as somewhat of a cipher.

Holofcener, like other indie directors before her (Ed Burns in She’s the One, Miguel Arteta in The Good Girl), loves to point the camera at Aniston’s placid face (for someone of such small-screen experience, Aniston does plaintive surprisingly well) and try to tell us that this passes for profundity. Unfortunately, Olivia is bland and easy to read; her obsession with a married former fling marks her as depressed, and the film’s clever welcoming bosom for her in the end comes off chiefly as a shrug. The actual friends with money, though, are far more fascinating. Their problems may be more abstruse and open to debate, but because of that, they’re more real. They’ll be the ones you’ll be talking about on the way home.

Friends with Money comes to DVD presented in a regular plastic Amaray case. Its supplemental extras include an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette and a lively, feature-length audio commentary track with Holofcener and producer Anthony Bregman. There’s also a combined nine minutes of footage from the movie’s Sundance Film Festival bow and its Los Angeles premiere at Grauman’s historic Chinese Theater. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)