Especially in her films during the last decade, Nicole Holofcener’s instincts as a writer-director can get in the way of her strengths. Her best work is naturalistic and unconcerned with how a gesture or conversation or scene fits into a larger thematic Purpose; this is a filmmaker, after all, whose debut feature was called Walking and Talking. Holofcener has a real sense of how people behave — particularly how white, upper middle-class, anxiety-ridden folks squirm their way through daily existence. It’s true that Friends with Money and Please Give, still two of her finest, had some larger salient points to make about class guilt, but they were also never or rarely hemmed in by their high concepts or schematic plots like Enough Said and The Land of Steady Habits would be later on. It’s as if the sensibilities gleaned from her for-hire gigs on sitcoms finally started to bleed into her cinematic portfolio. Thankfully, Holofcener’s seventh film, You Hurt My Feelings, doesn’t suffer from its two predecessors’ shortcomings to the same extent.
But it still feels the need to address and neatly resolve every one of the story beats it sets up in a way that feels overly tidy and perhaps exposes the simplicity or one-dimensionality of the observations it’s making. Feelings follows Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a novelist and English teacher living comfortably in New York City with her psychotherapist husband, Don (Tobias Menzies). She has an adult son, Eliot (Owen Teague), who is an aspiring writer, and she is close with her sister Sarah (the incandescent Michaela Watkins). The equilibrium of Beth’s existence is turned askew when she overhears Don telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Succession’s Arian Moayed), that he doesn’t think the book she’s currently trying to get published is very good, certainly not up to snuff with her debut memoir, which didn’t sell anyway. This triggers a reckoning across the film’s cast of characters with inadequacy and dishonesty.
On a line-to-line basis, You Hurt My Feelings is a sharp-witted comedy of manners and self-exploration. Dreyfus, fresh off a career low in Kenya Barris’ race relations rom-com You People, reminds us of her charisma but is also given room to be needy, indulgent and bumbling/goofy in a refreshing capacity. She and Menzies grapple with their aging bodies in a frank manner, with Holofcener shooting them in medium shots and close-ups that don’t gawk at their sagging skin and shadow-rimmed eyes but don’t try to conceal them either. Some of Holofcener’s callbacks to scenes and ideas from earlier in the film even land, it’s just that other times they feel forced and overly telegraphed and make you wonder whether she has anything to say beyond: “people lie to each other to make life more bearable and sustain their love and that’s okay even though it can also sting.”
The movie is confused about its stance toward artists mining their traumatic pasts for content; in some moments, it approaches the subject with a flippant disdain, yet in the film’s third act an emotional reveal about Beth’s treatment by her father is supposed to elicit a poignance that falls flat. Similarly, though a bit more successfully, the movie attempts to address a primary critique of the director’s work—that she makes First World Problems films about a hermetically sealed ecosphere—by having the characters confront it head-on in the dialogue. “The whole world is falling apart and this is what you’re concerned about?” Sarah asks, while Beth concedes that her woes are purely narcissistic. As ever with this sort of thing though, does it make it any better or move the needle at all to simply acknowledge that you’re doing something and then keep doing it?
You Hurt My Feelings is indeed a diagrammatic look at very minor-level tragedies and grievances, but that’s also part of its charm, presenting a universe where small semantic discrepancies in a person’s word choice are matters of life or death. This scale of storytelling allows Holofcener to get off some deeply identifiable and amusing zingers and to capture a cast in uniformly strong shape, only minimally interrupted by structural contrivances.
Photo courtesy of A24
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