The premise of “You Hurt My Feelings” is so promising that you may find yourself increasingly distracted by the film’s missed opportunities. Its neatness, namely its tight sense of structure—every scene has a clear function and a clear payoff and explicitly legible text—is pleasurable in this debauched age of endless and pointless movies. The film is purposeful and driven, yet this neatness has a price, as “You Hurt My Feelings” evaporates the moment you leave the theater.
This is the MO of writer-director Nicole Holofcener, who since the 1990s has specialized in movies with characters working through issues that serve as the tip of emotional icebergs, which are resting below a surface of affluent customs. Her films are structured around a theme, whether it’s wealthy people’s attitudes toward charity in “Please Give” or friends with income disparities in “Friends with Money,” or the notion of grilling a new beau’s ex for inside information in “Enough Said.” These problems are chewed over and usually discarded for disappointing restorations of status quo.
The juicy high concept on hand in “Your Hurt My Feelings” pertains to the intricate tissue of lies that we casually construct in order to live with ourselves. “Honey, you don’t need to lose weight.” “That was nice last night.” “I like your brother, but I feel that he needs to find direction.” Nothing unforgiveable, but the sort of evasions that cast a spell of self-delusion that, when disrupted, can cause existential turmoil.
Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer who has long been married to Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist. They live comfortably in New York City and have a twentysomething son, Eliot (Owen Teague), who is writing his first play. They bullshit one another in a typical, harmless manner. Beth tells Eliot that she’s sure his play is wonderful even though she hasn’t read it. Beth and Don pretend to like one another’s lame anniversary gifts, etc. Then Beth overhears Don telling someone that he doesn’t like Beth’s first novel, even though he’s been encouraging to her face. This disrupts Beth’s careful reality and she grows to resent Don, who eventually reminds her that she treats Eliot with similar kid gloves. Meanwhile, Don overhears patients criticizing his methods, which he handles better than Beth does the possibility that she wrote a dull book. Once again, all very neat: every plot relates to every other plot, every detail clicks into coherent place.
And a writer is a great occupation for a character in a movie about the simultaneous value and tenuousness of self-delusion, of course. A word of advice to the friends and family of writers, whether they’re aspiring, successful, or everything in between: You probably know this already, but nothing you say will satisfy them. Be nice and they distrust you, be mean, which is probably closer to the truth, and they will be angry with you. Writers determined to stick it through come to learn at some point that the process is the thing, and, after having countless darlings justifiably murdered by editors, their skin should thicken. If you write long enough, you come to stop fantasizing about achieving brilliance, valuing the sweet nectar of competency instead. If you get to that point, there are possibilities. This is why I didn’t believe that Beth would be so wounded by the possibility that someone close to her might not like her work. She’s awfully fragile for someone who has done well in a merciless profession.
Beth’s realization of Don’s deception is a device though—an entry point for Holofcener into a vaster network of white lies that … don’t matter all that much. Holofcener springs a nice little movie, well-written, sprightly, and well-crafted, which is what she usually does. Her repetitiveness and skillfulness are comforting; despite my tone, I’m fond of her work. But you may wish that she would take the gloves off. “You Hurt My Feelings” is practically begging its creator to let it be unruly.
The discovery that Don dislikes Beth’s novel leads to a few tame, unchallenging lifestyle observations. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is tired of being an interior designer and humoring the whims of her wealthy clients, while her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is a struggling actor who’s on the verge of letting the dream go. It’s Mark, in fact, to whom Don was confiding about Beth’s novel, a dissatisfaction that he voices with spotless sensitivity. Plenty of set up here, but little follow through, as Holofcener treads a fine line between subtlety and timidity. Couldn’t Don even speak bluntly of Beth while hanging with a bro? Must he be so exhaustingly well-adjusted? Previous Holofcener movies have parodied such men. What are the deep truths that Beth and Don suppress to keep their life functional? Is Sarah tired of presumably funding Mark’s acting venture? If there aren’t deep truths, that could be parodied too.
With this premise, there are endless possibilities for comedy that keeps it real, satirizing our own insecurities. Holofcener might have art-house cred, but she’s still conscious of her audience. Her brand is “lifestyle flick with brains,” for cinephiles and those who read the New Yorker, and one suspects that Holofcener doesn’t want to muddy that sandbox with material too risky. In fairness, Holofcener’s master subject, which unites all of her films regardless of their individual concepts, is caution. She makes movies about people who consider the realities that are just outside of their gated perimeters and who decide to essentially remain in their cocoons. But it’s impossible to separate the skittishness of Holofcener’s characters from that of the filmmaker herself.
You occasionally catch Holofcener striving for a more volatile kind of drama. “Friends with Money,” her best movie, is loaded with scenes that cut deeper than expected. I’ll never forget Catherine Keener imploring her husband Jason Isaacs to be kinder, reminding him of the ways he’s coddled. He has bad breath, for instance, which is why she suggests that he drink more water. Such a ruthlessly specific scene contains multitudes. Being told that you have bad breath, especially by your wife, is the sort of seemingly small thing that can be devastating—for starters, it’s a sideways comment on your desirability. And Jennifer Aniston’s entire performance in that movie, as the poor friend, is a remarkable blend of panic, resentment, despair, and absurdist comedy. Holofcener’s “Enough Said,” also with Louis-Dreyfus, was nervy as well, pivoting on the idea that you can love someone while nevertheless finding them physically unattractive.
“You Hurt My Feelings” never reaches those heights. It’s as if Holofcener overheard someone saying that they found her movies boring, thought “there’s the next one” and never went any deeper. There is something unnerving swimming around in “You Hurt My Feelings” that Holofcener doesn’t grab hold of: the idea that some people aren’t talented in the pursuits that obsess them, and that their lives would be better if they gave up and moved onto something fitting. In our culture of relentless, prefab positivity, in which every other movie tells everyone that they’re wonderful for the sake of selling toys and diet gimmicks, this theme is taboo. This feeling of specialness is the true feeling being prodded by Holofcener’s title, but she can’t quite go there. The film retreats to self-actualization, only in a more qualified state than usual for Hollywood movies.
This waffling shortchanges Beth, letting her, the other characters, and the audience off the hook. As usual, Louis-Dreyfus is wonderful. She’s an actor who doesn’t show her work, who is never not believable, and who doesn’t go cutesy to earn the audience’s identification, which only enhances the audience’s complicity. The other actors, especially Teague, who was so promising in “To Leslie” last year, are similarly confident—kinship with actors is one of Holofcener’s greatest strengths as an artist. Despite everyone’s efforts though, Beth is a sitcom figure with a sitcom problem who needs to grow up. My friends won’t read this review because they don’t care, and I’m okay with that, especially considering that I barely understand what any of them do for a living myself. Writers are just people with jobs, no more, maybe less.
“You Hurt Mu Feelings” is now playing at Movieland at Boulevard Square.
