There was a time when it seemed like every movie trailer for every single comedy began with bouncy music and a voice-over artist explaining cheerfully, “[NAME OF PROTAGONIST] had it all!” But at the beginning of Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) does, in fact, seem to have it all: she’s in a long-lasting marriage with a successful therapist, they have a great apartment on the Upper West Side, their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is writing his first play, she teaches writing at the New School, and she’s just finished her second book. “We’re so lucky,” she and her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), tell each other at the conclusion of another anniversary dinner. And they are. But!
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There’s always more going on under the surface. Don seems, in many ways, to be an utterly terrible therapist – poor listener, bad memory, mixing up patients, offering up platitudes instead of insights (“I’m feeling kinda off my game,” he admits). Eliot is out of school and aimless, and much to Beth’s chagrin, he’s working at a weed dispensary. And then one afternoon, in a sneak-up prank that goes awry, Beth overhears Don telling one of their mutual friends that her book — the one she’s spent two years on and that he read multiple drafts for, offering endless encouragement and support — is bad. “I don’t like this new book,” he despairs.
“I think they were talking about something else!” her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) insists desperately.
And they’re off. “You Hurt My Feelings” is very much about the emotional fallout of Beth’s unfortunate eavesdropping, but it doesn’t stop there; this feels like one of Holofcener’s most personal films, dealing as it does in so much material specifically related to being a writer and creative person. “Write your heart out, and then don’t show it to ‘em,” she advises her writing students, reminding us that the life of a writer is one where boundaries are to be pushed, if not ignored entirely. Conflicts and conversations become fodder for fiction; work happens in the middle of the night, on weekends, and on vacation.
A bond is forged between the writer and their supportive (always and only supportive!) spouse, and Don has broken it. “I am never gonna be able to look him in the face again!” Beth despairs. “I mean, that’s over!” And while the slight is immediate and personal (“I just need his approval! Of all people!”), Holofcener’s smart script works through all of the implications, both comic and emotional. Beth discovers her despair is a grenade pin you can pull with all sorts of other people (she starts asking strange couples at bars what they think of each other’s work), but more pressingly, it puts her on the canvas, a series of body-blows to her already fragile self-confidence. Is her whole life a lie?
The entire dirty mess hits the fan at a birthday dinner for Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor who has just lost a gig. That scene is a little masterpiece — wildly funny, sure, but also viscerally uncomfortable and emotionally tough. Holofcener is walking a tightrope here, pulling laughs of all sorts from this situation without ever trivializing it or what it’s done to Beth. It may be a funny scenario, but it doesn’t feel funny to Beth, and Louis-Dreyfus gets to play some refreshingly new variations on her patented neurosis, which is here crossed with genuine existential fear. (Indie comedy stalwart Watkins is a good scene partner for her; they have a great, comfortable comic rhythm.) And then that material dovetails into an unexpectedly poignant scene with their son, whose complaints remind us that damage can be done to our psyches by the expectations and even support of the people we love.
All of which makes “You Hurt My Feelings” sound like a too-serious navel-gazing drama, and it’s anything but. I found myself laughing loudly and frequently, and while one should resist the urge to turn a review into an inventory of its most quotable lines, well:
“I don’t fucking know; there are so many channels!”
“Is she jealous of the homeless?”
“Can you shut up and keep talking?”
“Are we dead yet? You carry around TUMS in your purse?”
“I’m sorry that you were fired from your job, and happy birthday.”
If anything, the film suffers from too many comic MVPs; David Cross and Amber Tamblyn have a handful of scenes as clients of Don’s, a miserable married couple whose every syllable and gesture is loaded with seething contempt for the other, and they’re so electrifying that you wish they had a movie of their own. And then, lo and behold, Jeannie freaking Berlin shows up as Beth and Sarah’s batty mother.
“You Hurt My Feelings” feels less like the title for a new Holofcener than a through-line of her filmography; her very first film, the wonderful “Walking and Talking,” staged an inadvertently overheard nasty joke as a major moment of romantic betrayal, while its follow-up “Lovely and Amazing” featured an agonizing centerpiece scene of a woman imploring her romantic partner for absolute honesty, a plea she immediately regrets. The new film most directly recalls “Enough Said,” Louis-Dreyfus and Holfocener’s collaboration of a decade ago, which also concerned the Louis-Dreyfus character hearing things she shouldn’t. This film doesn’t quite measure up to that one — Jeffrey Waldon’s cinematography is oddly murky, and Menzies can’t provide the strong counterpoint James Gandolfini did. But it’s nevertheless smart, warm, and very, very funny. [B]
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