'You Hurt My Feelings' Review: Witty Marital Comedy Shows All's Fair in Love and Little White Lying
You Hurt Your Feelings
R: For language
Runtime: 1 Hour and 33 Minutes
Production Companies: FilmNation Entertainment, Likely Story
Distributor: A24
Director: Nicole Holofcener
Writer: Nicole Holofcener
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, Jeannie Berlin
Release Date: May 26, 2023
Only In Theaters
After her memoir underperforms, NYC-based novelist and writing teacher Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) struggles with writing her new fictional novel. She entrusts her unsuccessful therapist husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), with every draft she completes. Don always provides feedback, strengthening their longtime love. Their co-dependent dynamic is so tight it makes their 20-something-year-old aspiring playwright son Eliot (Owen Teague) feel like a third wheel on family outings. One day as Beth and her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) are hanging out, they walk in on Don and Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), having a private conversation about how much Don hates Beth’s writing. Beth, feeling betrayed, starts acting distant towards an unsuspecting Don, who is already having problems at work with his mean-spirited patients.
Since the 2013 Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini-led rom-com Enough Said, writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s projects have strictly been book-to-film adaptations. Though adaptations like Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Last Duel were critically received, I missed her distinctively clever, down-to-earth original dramedies. Holofcener's latest, You Hurt My Feelings, offers a unique marital comedy that asks, “What if you lied to your longtime partner about how you feel towards her work?” It’s a simple premise for a feature-length film, but it’s Nicole Holofcener. You know she’ll execute it with hilarity and richness.
Holofcener’s inventive screenplay prospers from a well-rounded balance between privilege and patheticness with every character, especially Beth and Don. Their marriage and middle-class status are secure, yet they’re equally mediocre and miserable in their fields.
Beth tries her darndest to make her writing stand out. Given the competitive nature of the NYC talent pool, she’s stuck in the shadow of better writers. It doesn’t help that close-orbited folk like her mother and agent are condescending toward her writing. Like many writers, she exploited her childhood trauma for profit. Once it’s revealed that Beth’s definition of abuse is so loose, all she received was being name-called “stupid” by her dad. By the time she comes across her book in stores (through a hilarious visual gag featuring pull quotes), you can sense her confidence hanging by a thread.
For Don, his regular patients, familial-issued Jim (Zach Cherry), and bickering couple Jonathan (David Cross) and Carolyn (Amber Tamblyn), are dissatisfied with the quality of his services. He even catches Jim calling him a “fucking moron” at the end of one of their Zoom sessions. Don and Beth’s issues align with Beth’s sister Sarah, an interior designer working with indecisive clients, and her washed-up actor husband Mark, who is waiting for his big break.
It takes a while for the film to reach its primary conflict, but the way Holofcener establishes the ho-hum NYC livelihoods of her ensemble, primarily Beth, naturally elevates the ironic, comedic tone while building upward momentum. YHMF has an authentic NYC identity that amplifies the humor, like how comedy shows Party Down and Curb Your Enthusiasm do with aging media-oriented people living in LA. In any other city, their mediocrity would garner prosperity, but where people are objectively better in their fields than them, the best they can do is coast by. Oh, and aging is a major factor in that delusion. Ah, I love that message!
Lying to your partner about your honest feelings toward their work is a specific yet unspoken conversation with light stakes. So, it's refreshing to see how YHMF avoids melodramatic trappings. When Beth starts feeling some type of way toward Don, you never get the sense their marriage is in jeopardy. It maintains its integrity and lighthearted nature, delivering a conversation about love with resounding warmth.
Not much needs to be said about the ensemble performances. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is fantastic and hilarious, as usual. She and Tobias Menzies have solid natural chemistry with their back-and-forth banter, boosted by their respective characters’ distinctive personalities. The same feat is also carried by Michaela Watkins and Arian Moayed, who have such excellent comedic presence onscreen with each other and their relatives. Casting comedic powerhouses Louis-Dreyfus and Watkins as sisters was a genius move, and it worked in spades.
As consistent as YHMF’s natural surrealistic humor is, something wild occurs during the film’s final act between Beth and her son Eliot that caught me completely off-guard. The event’s unexpected but comes across as a forced resolution between Beth and Eliot’s minor subplot.
You Hurt My Feelings exemplifies Nicole Holofcener’s signature sharpness through a lighthearted, entertaining comedy that discusses love and lying with newness.
