A hot button issue in recent cinema criticism – well, warm button anyway – is the eradication of intelligent mid-budget dramas in the Hollywood system. Making decently acted, well-written, approachable, middle to upper-middlebrow movies with three or four grownup leads for theatrical release used to be an honourable tradition. Now it’s getting squeezed out by franchise products, and maybe because producers dread an eye-rolling comment of “first world problems” at the pitch meeting.
But writer-director Nicole Holofcener is keeping the flag flying with her shrewd, talky movies about middle-aged anxiety. I wasn’t a fan of Friends With Money, but Enough Said, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini, was a terrific romantic comedy. Now there is You Hurt My Feelings, a smart, if faintly exhausting comedy about midlife disillusionment with a lot of bitter in the bittersweet. Articulate, depressed, middle-aged people in New York with classy jobs, impossible aged parents and tricky twentysomething kids, have chance encounters in stores and on the streets and later confide tensely to each other about the resulting conversations. It’s very much in the template that Woody Allen and Nora Ephron made famous, but with winces and groans where the laughs would otherwise go.
Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer who once had a reasonable success with a personal trauma memoir about her abusive father, though wondering grimly if it would have sold better if he had been physically rather than just verbally abusive. Now she has produced her follow-up after many agonised drafts; it is a novel which her agent doesn’t much like, though she gets loyal support and praise for this new work from her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies).
One day Beth is shopping with her sister Sarah, played by Michaela Watkins, who is an interior designer (that time-honoured upmarket movie profession) and they see Don chatting intimately with Sarah’s actor husband Mark (played by Arian Moayed, Kendall Roy’s duplicitous pal Stewy in TV’s Succession). They creep up, hoping to spring a zany surprise, but are then paralysed with embarrassment and horror to overhear Don saying how much he actually hates his wife’s new novel.
Louis-Dreyfus is such a superb comic performer that it is interesting seeing her take on something low-key and also, I have to say, there is something devastating in seeing her cry on camera. It is also disconcerting in the same way to see that wonderful comic actor David Cross, playing one of Don’s therapy patients, be so thoroughly obnoxious.
Menzies has the movie’s best moment when he is counselling a young woman complaining about her boyfriend’s impossible behaviour. With an almost insufferably wise and patient smile, Don asks if she doesn’t see the resemblance: isn’t that how her father also behaves? The patient denies it and a mortified Don realises that he is thinking of a different patient. His all-knowing persona crumbles to dust.
You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less. The hurt feelings are soothed; though perhaps it would have been interesting to keep them hurt and see where the anger takes us.
• You Hurt My Feelings is released on 8 August on Prime Video.
