Critics who have called Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings” a comedy about a trivial subject (or, in reference to star Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ breakthrough role in “Seinfeld”, “A film about nothing”) must be safer people than me. The dilemma of Louis-Dreyfus’ Beth, a creative writing teacher who has just finished her second book, strikes me as extraordinary (to reinstate a different Seinfeldism). film worthy. After overhearing her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) telling her brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed) that he was only pretending to like his wife’s new novel, Beth experiences a crisis that is both personal and professional is. How long has he been pretending to like your work? Is it any good? Is it important?
Beth and Don’s marriage, previously so close that their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) complained about feeling like a third wheel, becomes strained, and Don’s own work crisis deepens: he’s a psychotherapist whose clients losing patience with him failure to give useful advice. It’s not entirely clear if the clients (including a hilarious pair of abusive spouses played by real-life couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) are unrealistically demanding or if Don’s long-suppressed workplace burnout has just turned him into a terrible listener. Beth’s sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) is also disenchanted with her work as an interior designer for the super-rich, while her actor husband (Moayed) considers giving up his career after a period of discouraging setbacks.
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You Hurt My Feelings is more than the study of a single character. It’s a chamber music piece about a quartet of people grappling with the same shared but painful life experience: the realization that after a few decades into adulthood, one’s future is unlikely to be as prosperous, as fulfilling, as special as one had hoped for. That sounds like a dark subject for a film, but You Hurt My Feelings (which lasts just 93 minutes) makes it both a serious subject for thought and a source of effervescent comedy. Beth’s inability to overcome the ego blow suffered by that fateful moment of eavesdropping is easy to understand – I mean, the man lied about liking the book over the course of 20 drafts! – but it is also objectively absurd. As she reluctantly agrees with her sister, she knows she’s getting along pretty well with her cozy Manhattan apartment, her devoted partner, and her loving if aimless son (Eliot is an aspiring writer himself and works the counter at a weed dispensary). Don’s opinion on the manuscript, which he insists on first when the truth behind his wife’s bad mood emerges, is just one reader’s reaction. He loves her, he assures her – isn’t that all that matters? “Oh, ok. Well then…never mind!” Beth sniffles before storming off angrily. Her whiny reaction is childish and self-pitying, if amusing given Louis-Dreyfus’s command of her comical instrument. But it rings all too true to anyone who has ever offered the fruits of his creative labors to a loved one whose opinion he values Twenty designs!
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Holofcener has already penned the screenplay for another great film about a writer’s struggles, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy as a show business biographer who turns to fake literature to make ends meet. Holofcener is the creator of dialogical ensemble comedies such as Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Please Give, and the romantic comedy Enough Said (starring Louis-Dreyfus). In the truest sense of the word, Holofcener is a writer and director, a filmmaker. Films are characterized by the attention they pay to the nuances of everyday language and behavior. In her screenplays, she finds humor in whole situations and contexts rather than in quotable one-liners. Scenes often end a moment earlier than in traditional comedy, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. Although the dialogue is naturalistic, it never sounds improvised. It depends on the exact language used, because when an insult Beth keeps muttering to herself in a moment of self-mockery turns out to be a refrain put into her head long ago by her abusive father became.
Louis-Dreyfus is as apt a muse for the middle-aged holofcener as Catherine Keener was for the director’s early career.
Louis-Dreyfus is as apt a muse for the middle-aged Holofcener as Catherine Keener was for the director’s early career: both are comedians with great timing and a vulnerability that even the most dry tone can’t hide. Over nine seasons of Seinfeld and seven seasons of Veep (with many memorable film and television roles in between), Louis-Dreyfus has honed her ability to penetrate her characters’ small, everyday vanities. In You Hurt My Feelings, she gets a chance to showcase her expertise while showing us the real pain and confusion that underlies Beth’s often insanely self-sabotaging behavior. Tobias Menzies, an English actor who has been a fixture on prestigious television since the HBO series Rome in the mid-2000s (he has since had roles on Game of Thrones, The Night Manager and The Crown) , is every match as Louis-Dreyfus to the outwardly calming, inwardly anxious Don, who not only struggles with problems at work but also with feelings of alienation from his own aging body; Blinking his crow’s feet in the mirror, he complains to his wife, “I used to be hot.” Arian Moayed enjoys playing a hypersensitive actor-wannabe who couldn’t be more different than Succession’s slick Stewy, while the Former “Saturday Night Live” actress Michaela Watkins is the only member of the film’s central foursome to portray a wry-humored delight who is able to maintain a certain sense of perspective.
One could certainly, like Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, dismiss “You Hurt My Feelings” as a little film about whiny, navel-staring Manhattanians who could take “cybernetic pterosaurs firing Sidewinder missiles down Madison Avenue To be chased along.’ Alien poison.’ But in a film landscape where most multiplex offerings offer virtually exactly this storyline, the existence and permanence of such films seems something to be protected and cherished. The protagonist of this film goes to great lengths to confirm that the words she tries to put on paper every day matter. The film’s writer-director, one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices to be found in comedy cinema right now, doesn’t have to worry about a thing.