You Hurt My Feelings is the best moral comedy of 2023. – Slate

In Slate's annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails fellow critics – for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman and Mark Harris – about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

My Crix colleague,

In a recent interview, Brit Marling, an actor and screenwriter who has worked in both films and television, shared what I thought was a sharp analysis of the current industry landscape. When asked about the abrupt cancellation of her critically and popular Netflix series “The OA” in 2019, Marling complained about the growing acceptance of entertainment companies

This idea of ​​applying economies of scale to storytelling, or this idea that you can just make more stories reach more people and make them faster and cheaper. We're in a strange world when stories need to appeal to more than 50 million people to work. What this ultimately means is that you largely transition to only telling stories that have already been told before.

Marling's point about the misapplied concept of “economies of scale” echoes what Mark had to say about the number of underperforming Marvel and DC superhero releases this year and about the apparent strategy of the CEOs of those studios' parent companies: invest in theirs to retreat from well-financed hideouts and point their fingers viciously as they plan their next phase of multimedia viewer trapping. Five DC superhero films from 2025 linked to five new spin-off TV shows? In this economy? It's a strange conclusion to draw from the fact that audiences are becoming less and less interested in the content you put out, that what they really want is a whole lot more of the exact same type of content, but after a one year break.

Exactly what “this economy” is in Hollywood right now is still in flux after a year of labor unrest, not just on the part of actors and writers, but also below-the-line crew members, like the whopping Marvel VFX artist who recently worked for voted to form a union. I honestly believe that one of the reasons the comic book adaptation's rose is starting to wear thin has not only to do with superhero fatigue, but also audiences' growing distaste for them, too, being just another widget instrumentalized by the five remaining studios' long-term plan to extract the greatest possible shareholder value from every warm body in their area, employees and customers alike.

There will always be a certain section of hardcore fans that welcomes any new version of a popular franchise, no matter the medium. And that's great – fandom has long been a crucial part of the industry's economic functioning and a (usually positive) source of community among viewers. But the decline of the superhero monoculture in recent years seems to be accompanied by the widespread recognition that the net effect of the genre's decade and a half of box office dominance has been an impoverishment: certainly of the film landscape as a whole. but also from the consumption experience of each individual viewer. At least we were promised that after the “streaming revolution” (go to the barricades!), home theater would cost less than cable TV and make room for more niche, individual programming. Instead, the big innovation from entertainment's brightest minds in 2023 is to… recycle old DC movies on the ad-supported free network Tubi, recreating the experience of watching TV with commercials in 1979? By God, Zaslav, I think you did it!

Speaking of economies of scale, let me now go down a few dozen degrees of scale to respond to something Mark wrote that concerns not the business side, but the (much nicer, worthy of discussion) artistic side of films. In my top 10 list post on Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, I refer to this sui generis writer-director as the underrated Éric Rohmer of contemporary American cinema. The protagonist of Holofcener's latest comedy of manners, an anxious, distressed writer played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, could well be a Rohmer heroine. In the interest of your own self-care, I hope you've seen all three of “The Green Ray,” Rohmer's 1986 film about a single Parisian woman whose major driving conflict is that she now has to live her summer vacation because of a travel companion's changed plans spend… her enviably long European summer vacation… wandering around various attractive beach towns on the French coast… alone. “The Green Ray” is a full-fledged film about life as a lonely, aimless and dissatisfied complainer, a condition that most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. It is also one of the French master's greatest works, both in its curiosity and tenderness toward its subject and in its stubbornly idiosyncratic definition of what counts as “stakes.”

The fate of an infinity of multiverses may not depend on whether Beth, Louis-Dreyfus' character in You Hurt My Feelings, emerges from the panic she falls into when she overhears her husband casually trash-talking a friend talked about her novel. But Beth controls the fate of some things that most of us value in our daily lives far more than the most powerful, portal-opening space jewel: her ability to carry on, to trust that her marriage will survive this wound to her vanity, the Die People closest to her still love and respect her and her work has value in itself. Mark, I agree with you that I'm open to a Hobbit-length trilogy about the further neurotic adventures of Beth, perhaps without Peter Jackson's stunning ultra-high definition cinematography – although, come to think of it, little The format could add a cool body horror element to the film's recurring theme of its middle-aged characters' dissatisfaction with their own sagging faces and bodies.

What really makes the dour domestic comedy “You Hurt My Feelings” sing is the collaborative chemistry between Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus. The two first worked together a decade ago in the now bittersweet-to-watch film Enough Said – bittersweet because it was one of James Gandolfini's final roles before his untimely death and seemed to herald a new era for him as a comic leading man. Although this director-actor combination has only made two films together, their pairing has the ironic rightness of a long-standing creative partnership like that between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro or Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore (all of them). have also realized innovative new works together in 2023). Holofcener is a miniaturist of a screenwriter, and Louis-Dreyfus understands that; She portrays Beth's petty vanities and social humiliations with the precision of a chef in “The Bear” adding daisy petals to a micro-dessert with tweezers.

Bilge, since we spent most of the last round talking about big topics – blockbuster culture, box office trends, Barbenheimer – can you relax the room with a discussion of a smaller title on your extensive top 20 list? Kelly Reichardt, a director who is usually one of my My Guys, made a little indie this year called Showing Up, which to my surprise wasn't on my list. I appreciated the performances of Michelle Williams and Hong Chau as an art-enemy couple with a strained tenant-landlord relationship, as well as the distinctiveness of the Portland gallery scene captured by Reichardt's ever-patient camera. But the ending (by which I mean the last 20 minutes or so, not just the last scene) felt indecisive to me in a way that seemed less vaguely ambiguous and more simply vague. Reichardt is usually great when it comes to endings, but for all his observational detail, I had a hard time grasping what this film was ultimately trying to say. Bilge, I see “Showing Up” on your list, so I'm wondering if you could help us see the beautiful sculpture you recognized beneath what is, to me, a still rough clay surface – or if you have another small, independent one masterpiece that you liked.

Looking for the last space gem to embed in my cosmic gauntlet,

Dana