I love the full sentence in the title. Even better is a full sentence title that also describes the filmmaker’s main concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” epitomizes Nicole Holofcener’s experience, funny in its wounded insensitivity.
This will be the seventh comedy she has written and directed since 1996. It contains more emotional harmony and generosity than her other films, and it takes into account the ways in which we hurt each other, including her partners, strangers, and children. Her characters, comfortable New Yorkers and Angelenos, tend to hit hard. Their preferred approach to honesty is brazenness. The new film embraces more constructive impulses.this is DisThe honesty she’s interested in here, the gentle kind of honesty that one character calls “white lies” in defense of herself, what she tells people because the truth is everything.
The White Liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been reading draft after draft of his wife Beth’s (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) novel and telling her how good it is. The film begins at a Manhattan sporting goods store when she hears her sister’s husband, Mark (Ariane Moayid), say that the truth is that he doesn’t like the book, but that she will die if she finds out the truth. It’s a story about what happens after he’s not wrong She plays the role of breaking down in two scenes with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), and she’s convinced she can’t trust Don anymore. But Holofcener is more drawn to the healing process than to the wound.
Twenty minutes passed before I met the sporting goods store. At that point, the movie has already shown us what life is like for Beth and Don, together and apart. They have such a strong, affectionate, and subconsciously idiosyncratic bond that they share an ice cream cone as a bed. Perhaps the one thing that keeps a marriage strong is saying “I love this” and “It’s great” when it’s not. A white lie is like Advil in certain relationships. They reduce inflammation. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, her quill is raised. She ignored him and kept her distance and started sleeping on the couch, and he was confused. Then one night, in front of Sarah, Mark, and a sad bowl of loincloth salad, she tells him she heard him. And this movie does one thing too little in an American marriage comedy: to judge disappointment. It becomes about the truth flowing out of removing that burden.
Holofcener made the wise decision to engage Beth and Don in the business of constructive integrity. She teaches writing to adults. he is a therapisthe doesn’t think so really like What they do seems to make a good living at it. We observe how she reacts to the story ideas of her four students and possibly to the actual works, and we are able to observe him with several of his patients. Holofcener’s movie is Fleet. It rarely crosses the 92 minute mark. But their social resonance stems from their prodigious proficiency.
Every relationship, and almost every scene Holofcener gives us, explores some sort of candor, an act of leveling. Between Don and Beth. Beth and Sarah. Beth and Don and their misty 23-year-old son (Owen Teague). Beth and her agent (Latanya Richardson Jackson). Beth, Sarah, and their mother (Jeanie Berlin) are widowed and live in hiding with her daughters. Two married lesbians get into an argument with a tipsy Beth.Sarah seems to be an interior coordinator, especially especially Clients were frustrated with their lighting preferences. On top of that, everything about Mark, whose career as a student, patient, and actor is neutral. I didn’t mention Beth’s rather successful memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, but I need to hear that title leak out of Louis-Dreyfus’ mouth. But Holofcener could have used it in any of her films.
Her targets, themes and tropes have not changed. It’s still narcissism and personal vanity (Don wants her eye job). It is still due to the emotional turmoil of rich, disaffected liberals who need blacks and poor to successfully see themselves as good whites. (Beth and Sarah are self-indulgent volunteers at the church’s surprisingly stingy clothing presents.) An American director so intent on exposing bourgeois city dwellers’ self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement. No.
The nasty, obnoxious, cruel characters are still here too. Most of them are just sitting on Don’s couch. The toughest of them all is the couple played by (actually married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. The two hate each other and spray bile on Don. Now, Holofcener’s film allows us to study severe marital dysfunction from the perspective of a mental health professional, someone who, in his private life, takes a very different approach to communicating with his wife. Menzies’ lighthearted neutrality here serves perfectly for both the curly Don and her husband Don.
Despite this, Holofcener remains more interested in character than great acting. It makes sense because she needs a cast to bring her closer to some version of us and the people we recognize. In other words, everyone here is life-sized. Louis-Dreyfus knows how to find real pathos in haste. She’s good at channeling Holofcener’s casually cranky snobs (about new coffee shops, clean menus, and $19,000 benches). Beth was in the middle of making racist remarks about the weed shop where her son works when the film’s most incredible incident happened.
Part of my mind wanted Holofcener to do something wilder: comedy with a sense of crisis. As were some of her early films. It’s like the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her work on ego and vulnerability is closer to Albert Brooks and Larry David, and is more about etiquette violations than psychological bankruptcy. Still, this feels like quiet progress for her. She put away her emotional dynamite (her most consistent TNT supplier, Catherine Keener, is not here). Rather, this is a job of discipline and structure. This is situation comedy in the best classic sense. These people’s ethical issues sometimes become our issues too. I was Beth I was a don And I got to see through my fingers half of what they were dealing with.
you hurt me
Rated R for language (the painfully honest kind). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. at the theater.
