There are those who argue that a film critic should avoid discussing the circumstances of their particular screening– audience reactions, crowd size, and so on– and stick solely to the movie at hand. This is, I think, mostly reasonable in principle; readers will presumably hope to gain insight into whether they should see the film themselves, and unless the other spectators are being paid by the theater to put on a floor show their experience will obviously be a different one. But I disagree that a critic’s moviegoing experience is irrelevant to their review. The particulars of how, where, and when we engage with a work informs not only our opinions, but the very lens through which we view it. This information is not necessary to include in a review, but I believe it does help to illuminate where the critic is coming from, and can prove invaluable in placing a film into a greater context.
It is in the interest of transparency, then, that I feel that I should mention that the preview screening I attended for Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings turned out to be an AARP-sponsored “Movies for Grown-Ups” event. Watching the film in a theater packed to the gills with socializing retirees was as amusing and faintly surreal as you might expect, but it made me appreciate You Hurt My Feelings in a way I might not have ordinarily. This is a movie for grown-ups– and that’s a good thing.
If the characters in You Hurt My Feelings probably aren’t quite old enough to join AARP, they’re reaching the age where they’re realizing they should maybe not throw out all those mailers. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer whose debut memoir (the hilariously titled I Had to Tell It) was a modest success, but whose follow-up, a novel, has been slow to develop. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a psychiatrist struggling with mid-career doubts of his own; in one of the film’s funniest runners, we sit in on sessions with a squabbling couple (played by real-life partners Amber Tamblyn and David Cross) whose only point of agreement seems to be Don’s eternal unhelpfulness. Beth and Don are devoted to each other, but can’t help but fall into some of the ruts of middle-aged couplehood; they visit the same restaurant every year for their anniversary, where she gives him another cashmere sweater and he gives her another pair of gold-leaf earrings. Their life is happy and successful, if not particularly dynamic.
This balance is thrown into chaos, however, when Beth and her sister Sarah (a scene-stealing Michaela Watkins) eavesdrop on a conversation between their husbands in which Don lets slip that he doesn’t care for the draft of Beth’s current book. Beth responds, reasonably, by running into the street and (unsuccessfully) retching into a trashcan. What follows is less of a blowout than a slow deflation; Don’s admission sends the already fairly neurotic Beth into a spiral, and Beth’s passive-aggressive retaliation (which consists of pretty much everything but actual confrontation) feeds into Don’s building midlife crisis.
The above could be the description of a ruthlessly dark comedy, or it could be a gentle aw-shucks portrait of the relatable foibles of middle age. You Hurt My Feelings walks a deceptively delicate line: it’s both of those things, and it’s neither. Holofcener’s script is razor-sharp in its portrayal of its characters’ occasionally absurd narcissism; when Beth’s mother (the always-welcome Jeannie Berlin) makes a casually snide remark about her book sales, Beth fires back “Well, maybe if Dad had been more than verbally abusive it would have sold better!” But it’s also clear that Holofcener has great affection for her characters, and wants them to be happy. Beth and Don, for all their bickering, are clearly still head-over-heels for each other. When they take their grown son Eliot (Owen Teague) out for lunch, he complains of feeling like a third wheel, watching as his parents share a salad and then an ice cream cone. This is not some Virginia Woolf-style battle of the spouses (though there is a very funny homage to An Unmarried Woman), but rather the story of a mostly-happy couple who find themselves in the sort of complicated tete-a-tete which all partners experience at one point or another. The suspense is not in whether the marriage will implode– most don’t within the span of 90 minutes– but how they’re going to navigate these choppy waters.
Like Kelly Reichardt’s excellent Showing Up earlier this year, You Hurt My Feelings is, at its heart, a remarkably grounded portrayal of creative and professional burnout. As a writer, I of course identified with Beth’s creeping dread that those who say they like her work are merely humoring her, and laughed as she obsessively compared the critical pull-quote on the cover of a better-selling competitor’s memoir (“Perilously close to perfect!”) to that of her own (“Moving!”). But all of the characters are experiencing similar malaise specific to their own occupations. Don struggles to keep his patients’ names and stories straight, and listens through the door to hear what they mutter after a session. Sarah is an interior decorator whose job seems to consist entirely of demonstrating a series of increasingly outlandish wall sconces to the same, perpetually unsatisfied client. Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed) is trying to make it as a serious stage actor, but his most notable roles thus far have been bit parts in stoner comedies. Even young Eliot, a couple years out of college, is struggling to finish the first draft of his play as he spends his days behind the counter of a dispensary. Weariness, it seems, is going around, and no one is immune.
But if Beth is more dramatic about her creative crisis than Showing Up’s Lizzy (and, played as she is by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she’s pretty much bound to be), the two films are united in their sense that frustration and anxiety, creative and otherwise, are ultimately normal parts of life that we all have to deal with. Each of these characters eventually experiences some manner of breakthrough, and if the ending feels a bit pat, it’s a valuable reminder that this shit is rarely the end of the world. The situation between Beth and Dawn is a messy one with no clear solution, but that’s life; we all occasionally tell white fibs to protect the people we love, and one person’s ambivalence is not proof against another’s talent. In this, You Hurt My Feelings is, well and truly, a movie for grown-ups. Now, where’s my AARP card?
You Hurt My Feelings
2023
dir. Nicole Holofcener
93 min.
Opens Friday, 5/26 @ Somerville Theatre, Cinema Salem, West Newton Cinema, and elsewhere
