Great object lesson with this movie: The breadth, depth, and scope of a character's metamorphosis is scalable. This is an intimate, small story. Therefore the transformation Eva goes through matches that scale of size. She begins in Disunity: * Divorced. * Doing her best to avoid her daughter's leaving for college. Indeed it feels like Eva is doing some sort of projection thing onto Chloe which may be helping Eva cope with the idea of Ellen departing for school, perhaps thinking Chloe can fill that impending vacuum, but makes Ellen more and more angry. So at a time when you'd think mother would be making the most of the last few weeks before daughter leaves home, Eva comes nowhere close to that. * The runner of Eva's day-in-a-masseuse's-life suggests she doesn't find her work all that fulfilling. Meeting Marianne helps as she develops a fast friendship with her, but between bad breath guy, chatty woman, and guy who won't help Eva up the stairs with massage table as the recurring clients we see, not a lot of joy there. During the story's setup, we get the feeling Eva is in a pretty passive place in her life. Once she becomes friends with Marianne, starts sleeping with Albert, then discovers she's dating Marianne's ex-husband, she could assert herself, tell the truth, and proactively try to sort things out. Instead, she allows things to play out. In fact, Act II is a study in a character in reactive mode [note how easily influenced by Marianne about Albert, beginning to see him as the slob Marianne portrays him as]... until everything comes crashing down in the All Is Lost moment, the truth exposed. As we have discussed, Act III is quite short, and that reinforces the minimal nature of Eva's change. There are two small, yet significant proactive events: * First, in what I seem to recall is the 4th or even 5th time we've seen Eva's day-in-the-masseuse's-life runner, she actually asks the guy to help her climb the stairs with her massage table. In fact, he immediately agrees. This rather shocks Eva. How easy was that? * I think that actually is a bridge for what she does next: Visit Albert a 2nd time post-breakup. I'm not sure she would have had the gumption to do that during Act II. And so these two small acts suggest she is moving from reactive to proactive mode. Not a big change, but a change nonetheless. Finally, I'm thinking there has to be something at work thematically with re her job as a masseuse. Not sure what, but that can't have been an arbitrary choice on Holofcener's part. What did you think of Eva's psychological journey?

Enough Said Psychological journey Which characters go through a metamorphosis? Eva Where do they begin and where do they end in the transformation-journey? She begins divorced with a difficult non-communication relationship with her daughter, some how she doesn’t take care of her feelings responsabilities, what makes her feel afraid the hold second act though. Afraid to lose her sexual safety with Albert, her 'prestigious' and 'intimate' friendship with Marianne, and of course her (not so clear to me) power relationship with her daughter. What are the stages in their metamorphosis? She is a insecure women who has a very little idea of how she must take adult responsabilities over her own social and emotional life. She doesn't a keep them at the end either, she is afraid all the time of the consequences of never decide. Even whenever she tries to apologize, at second time by the way. She can't accept her mistake and get over it. An apology isn't Enough Said, against selfishness. How do plot points in the External World impact and influence the character’s change in the Internal World? She has a pretty bad idea of her own taste neither her principles. The people and the circumstances around dominated her will, even the need of being accepted by her teenage daughter... Jeez , she is a leaf ad air lib. Also the masagist job could represent her as a person who is meant to be condescending and compliant.

I also find Eva to be very insecure at the beginning, a result of her divorce -- because she was wrong about her ex-husband, made the wrong choice of him as a partner, she doesn't trust herself to make future decisions. When Marianne comes along, Eva's dazzled by her. She finds her to be very sophisticated (the chervil, "Blessings") and seems to think Marianne has answers to life that she doesn't. By the end, Eva learns to trust herself and the validity of her own feelings, a major step. I know what you mean about it being a small story, but I don't think her transformation is small at all. It's interesting though to me that Holofcener resolves almost all of the relationships, even minor ones like Sarah-Cathy and Eva-Hal, but not the ones between Eva and Marianne and Eva and Chloe (and, I suppose, Ellen and Chloe). In terms of Marianne, I feel like that's because it wasn't a relationship worth having -- it was fake (and Marianne always struck me as fake) so there really was nothing there to resolve.

Thanks for that analysis, Victoria. You raise some interesting points. Re the choice to make her a masseuse, I have done more thinking about that and what I have found is how ironic that a woman whose job is to TOUCH people is so out of TOUCH with her own Self. I doubt that's the reason why Holofcener chose that gig, probably more about the question, "How can I give Eva a job which will intersect her with a wide array of people of differing socioeconomic circumstances? But sometimes, our choices carry with them meaning we never intended - consciously.

mkm28, that's a really interesting point. Normally I would have noticed something like key subplots being left unresolved, but it never once occurred to me to think about Eva-Marianne. [In my mind, when Chloe heads off, that pretty much rounds off that subplot with Eva.] Perhaps I was so much wrapped up in Eva's fate. Or maybe I just didn't care all that much about Marianne. I didn't see the movie, so maybe I didn't pick up how 'fake' she is as you did. Anyhow good observation. As a lesson to us writers, we SHOULD try to round out every subplot. That's generally considered to be a sign of a good writer.