YOU HURT MY FEELINGS
**½/****
starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Jeannie Berlin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
NO HARD FEELINGS
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick
written by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips
directed by Gene Stupnitsky
by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings belongs, alongside stuff like Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life and Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust, to a very specific sub-genre of comedy. They’re talky, WASP-y, verging on the cusp of self-awareness at all times without ever quite slopping over from solipsistic, and clearly courting an educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class (white) audience. I like them, for the most part, with their hangdog protagonists, weary of idiots and drowning in debt to therapists and assorted medical specialists–none of whom seem capable of solving their own existential blues, much less their clients’. I know that emotional quagmire. I’ve made maps of it. This is the playland to which Zach Braff and Alison Brie bring their gnarled cinematic projects as well, slumming them up in quotidian drag so that their appeals to melancholy ring hollow, manipulative, and self-serving. They lack authenticity; their troubles aren’t lived-in but instead theoretical put-ons–the fake stories successful people tell at champagne brunches to appear afflicted by the same disappointments as you or me. You Hurt My Feelings doesn’t feel natural, either, I have to say, although that’s more to do with saturation than disingenuousness. I feel like I just saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus doing this in You People; I feel like indie comedies on indie budgets are all doing variations of the “talking in different found sets” thing. I feel like this is the third or fourth time this year I’ve been caught in a dense conversation with the same people complaining about the same problems in the same tone. It’s that phenomenon where you try to give your baby a novel name, and when they reach school-age, it turns out everyone in their class is named the same thing.
Louis-Dreyfus is writer Beth, who has seen her memoir published at some time in the past to minimal notice and is now in the process of finding a publisher for her first novel. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a distracted, disengaged, generally awful therapist whom Beth overhears one day telling his brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed), himself a struggling actor, that he doesn’t like Beth’s new book. This sends Beth into a self-pity spiral, to the consternation of her interior-decorator sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), and pothead son, Elliott (Owen Teague), an aspiring playwright. You Hurt My Feelings left me exhausted. It’s a needy film–an enervating conversation with that friend who makes everything into an opera of grand pronouncements and veiled suicide threats. You care, but you’re also wary of investing. Each question well-intended returns a challenging new subplot about, say, a bickering couple in Don’s practice (Amber Tamblyn and David Cross) asking for a refund because their marriage hasn’t improved, or a difficult Asian client who demands the ugliest sconce Sarah has ever seen to be procured and installed in her home. At a certain point, it’s hard not to wonder if the intended response to everyone in this picture is contempt rather than sympathy. After all, the only possible outcome of “Seinfeld” is that they all go to prison for being horrible. Saving grace? The cast and crew are good enough that when a happy ending is offered out of the blue, no matter how tidy or tonally unlikely, you’re grateful to accept it and move on.
Much better in every way at chewing over similar interpersonal issues is Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings. It’s sharp, clever, energetic, and fearless. At its centre is bartender/Uber driver Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a Montauk townie resigned to a life of such quiet desperation that when her car is repossessed, she resorts to prostitution to replace it. Not street-corner stuff or OnlyFans, but answering an ad asking for someone who can help an awkward 19-year-old boy come “out of his shell.” It’s not a new gig in an increasingly broken gig economy, it’s a one-time thing to facilitate her actual moonlighting gig so she can save her absent parents’ house from repo men for non-payment of taxes. Said kid needing to come out of his shell is Princeton-bound Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), gangly and helicopter-parented by his well-to-do mom and dad (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick). He’s so clueless to the brazen advances of no-nonsense Maddie that he mistakenly believes he’s being kidnapped at one point and maces Maddie full in the face. No Hard Feelings is a slapstick farce on one level and the kind of rude Superbad comedy of maximalism on the other–but it’s also a surgically-insightful film about the wealth divide in the United States and how far from land the rich have drifted over the last couple of decades. I think often about how former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was asked during one of his clown-show presidential runs how much a box of cereal costs and had to decline an answer. Money is radioactive material. I have never known anyone to have spent much time in possession of a significant sum of it who has not been mutated by it.
Percy’s parents believe their money can solve any of their child’s problems–a belief based on how their money has essentially already solved their problems. They live in opulence, they have a housekeeper whose labour they appropriate as their own, and they have things other people want and so use them to pander a sexual encounter for their virgin boy. They have no awareness that their power dynamic in most interactions is predatory. They think they’re doing everyone a favour. And because everyone wants something from them, they’re unfamiliar with being told they are ignorant, morally repugnant, or socially stunted and presumptuous. There’s a similar example of this in Peter Sohn’s Elemental, where an affluent and socially connected woman presumes to help out a girl from the wrong side of the tracks; I think the fact that we’re seeing more of these scenarios is symptomatic of our irreparable social balkanization. When Maddie shows up for her interview with the parents, she stands at the bottom of a steep set of stairs on her rollerblades and asks if they want to meet up where they are or if they’ll meet her at the bottom where she is. It’s not a subtle visual metaphor for status and the “invisible” American class system, though it is a good one that leads to the physical gag of Maddie struggling to climb stairs in her ridiculous getup. It obviously isn’t necessary for her to go to the trouble, since she’s wearing heels in the next scene, yet you can justify it as not only an opportunity for the gifted Lawrence to show her comic chops, but also a character-building shot across the bow in which Maddie tries to impart empathy in people for whom empathy is no longer a valued, or even necessary, quality. The rich don’t have to care what other people think anymore. Other people have to worry about what they think.
A killer set-piece begins with Maddie luring Percy out into the ocean for some nighttime skinny-dipping, only to be bullied by a trio of drunk kids who steal their clothes. She climbs out of the surf in all her natural glory and, in a sequence as unsexy as the naked knife fight in Eastern Promises, proceeds to kick everyone’s ass. Hilarious, sure, but hilarious specifically because it highlights how unselfconscious Maddie is about her body in a culture that’s invested in her being ashamed of it. I’m talking about Jennifer Lawrence now, too. And Miley Cyrus. Heroes. There are a lot of problems with a country founded by Puritans: rampant and institutionally sanctioned pedophilia in organized religion; a superstitious fear of knowledge; frequent rises in authoritarianism and white supremacy; and, of course, the desire to control female sexuality, no matter the cost to the continuation of the American experiment. “Doesn’t anyone fuck anymore? Weirdos!” shouts Maddie when she bursts in on multiple bedrooms at a high-school house party to find everyone behaving–and, yes, it’s fucking weird when primates of mating age don’t fuck. No Hard Feelings confronts a culture that has reached a place where expressions of sexuality are verboten but classrooms full of children getting perforated is fine–as long as they’re not reading books about two male penguins taking care of an egg. It’s an empathy gap. If we were living in a science-fiction film, it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and nothing that everyone is telling you is fine is actually fine.
The other killer bit in No Hard Feelings unfolds at a fancy restaurant for a “real” date between Maddie and Percy, so that Percy can begin to feel emotionally involved with Maddie and thus, finally, respond to her advances. They have, by this point, shared a sweet kiss, and Lawrence is such an exceptional actor you can mark the moment she realizes that someone likes her for reasons other than her promiscuity and beauty. To tease Percy, she goads him into playing the restaurant’s house piano. When he does, he does so beautifully, performing a song he’s learned in her honour: Hall & Oates‘ 1980s chart-topper “Maneater,” which he’s spent his life being afraid of because he thought it was about a monster. Maybe it is. He sings the line about “if you’re in it for love” and looks over at her, and for all the praise I have for Lawrence, here’s a moment for Feldman, taking a character type–a caricature, really–and filling it with the force of his humanity. I could watch this sequence over and over just for the way they interact with each other across a crowded restaurant. When he’s finished, Maddie throws food at him and says, “What the fuck?” in precisely the way you say when you’re touched, confused, stricken, ashamed–the panoply of emotions you experience when the way you see the world changes because someone treats you like you’re valuable for the first time in your life. Both struggle throughout the scene to keep their emotions in check: afraid to show each other and afraid to be seen as vulnerable by a roomful of strangers. It’s such a complicated scene, and it’s played perfectly. No, it’s played exquisitely. I love this movie. I wish the ending were less tidy (more ambiguous, maybe more pessimistic), but it’s a small complaint. No Hard Feelings is about kindness, really, being hung up on it instead of all the other ridiculous shit we’re told is somehow more important than that. Everyone is a devastation exhibit; some have simply curated it more effectively than others. I dreaded seeing this movie. Now I can’t wait to see it again.
