'You Hurt My Feelings' offers so much to think about
A24
Don’t come to “You Hurt My Feelings” for big laughs; the latest from writer-director Nicole Holofcener (“Lovely and Amazing,” “Friends with Money”) is only the kind of funny that makes people say “That’s funny” without laughing. Which, oddly, couldn’t be more fitting for a deceptively complex examination of the relationship between feelings and words, and how inadequately we often navigate the two.
Plot-driven, this is not; Holofcener excels at amplifying the little things between people that often go unseen or unsaid, and the booming sound of what might seem like something minor. The culprit here is Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhearing her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) confess that he doesn’t like her new book, and that in fact his favorable comments on every draft he read were merely insincere support. As you’d assume would be the case with any creative person, Beth strongly values her partner’s opinion and feels not only saddened by the invalidation of his words but everything implied by his inability to be direct.
Of course, when Beth’s mom (Jeannie Berlin) speaks frankly about her daughter’s memoir and that it should’ve sold better and that the marketing was ineffective, Beth doesn’t feel better about that either. The movie is a frozen pond cracking one inch at a time in consideration of all the ways people fail to communicate sufficiently. Sometimes it’s an innocent mistake, like Don, a therapist, mixing up his patients and inaccurately telling one that her significant other’s criticism resembles the behavior of her father, who in fact is nothing but loving. Other times the failures are despairing, as a couple who has been seeing Don for two years (real-life couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) bicker ruthlessly and show no progress since they started their sessions.
Is this a great date movie? Perhaps not if you’ve been holding back something that remains close to the surface.
In one late, notable scene, the pot shop where Beth and Don’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) works is robbed at gunpoint while Beth is shopping there, resulting in her attempting to protect him with her body while he tries to give the thieves the money they request. It’s a hell of a metaphor for the efforts of parents to protect their kids when in fact, as Eliot notes, she’s actually not helping the situation. If a loved one asks for your opinion about something they wrote/made/etc., do they really want the truth? Are they just looking for encouragement? Does it matter if you really, truly mean it? Holofcener considers the role of taste in any number of interpersonal encounters (including Michaela Watkins as Beth’s sister Sarah, an interior designer who resents her clients’ obnoxious judgments) as well as people’s tendencies to gloss over the work it takes to unpack messy issues. In two scenes a character attempts to deescalate conflict by asserting an abundance of love, and both times Beth shrugs it off, recognizing that love isn’t the point in that moment. Love, actually, is about acknowledging these tough moments and working through them, not just using the word like a tablecloth over a stain.
Less contrived than Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus’ previous collaboration (the nevertheless solid “Enough Said”), “You Hurt My Feelings” could do with some sharper humor and maybe a little more pep in its plotting. But the role of feedback within the functioning of support isn’t simple, and the film approaches this with curiosity and toughness (especially in recognizing that not everyone is good at what they do, and that comparing your own struggles to the world at large can be relevant and necessary in privilege-checking but not always useful). It also reminds me of questions I’ve wondered about regarding celebrity pairings that seem curious from a creative standpoint. For example, did Joanna Newsom like “That’s My Boy”? Did Florence Pugh enjoy “Wish I Was Here”? And if they didn’t, did they say so?
B+
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