Film Review - You Hurt My Feelings
Images courtesy of Roadshow Films.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, practically hyperventilating, bursts out onto a New York City street – she lurches toward a bin, retching from sheer emotional turmoil. Her character, Beth, is followed closely by her sister: “he loves your more than life itself!”
“What in the world does that have to do with anything?!” Comes Beth’s anguished reply. She’s just witnessed something earth-shaking. She’s a novelist, and has been extensively drafting a new book with supportive feedback from her husband (Tobias Menzies). While out her with sister, the pair have run into their husbands in a shop – but before they say anything, Beth overhears her husband – while unaware of her presence – telling her brother-in-law how awful he thinks her book truly is, and how much he thinks it would kill her to tell her the truth.
It’s a cracking premise, and one that’s typical of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s aptitude for fascinating social and romantic dilemmas. One of my favourites of her filmography, 2013’s Enough Said, again stars Louis-Dreyfus as a woman dating a man who she eventually comes to realise is the much-derided ex-husband of her newest friend. Holofcener tells stories about social mores, stories populated with fully-drawn characters and a sense of general adult maturity that comes from their emotional nuance, rather than explicit sexual or traumatic subject matter.
You Hurt My Feelings is all about the little lies we tell the people around us, not out of malicious intent, but in order to avoid a more destructive outcome. Beth’s husband Don is not a spiteful man, he’s just venting in a safe space (or, what he thought was a safe space) about a situation he’s unsure of how to handle. It’s not just Don though. What makes this film effective is that all the various characters’ interactions, in every scene, are meticulously written to explore this theme. As an exercise in deliberate, focused screenwriting, it’s a breezy 93-minute human study that chooses its subject and sticks to it.
The narrative moves quickly: there is absolute zero fat on Holofcener’s scenes, we consistently pick up on characters as soon as soon as they begin talking and we leave for another scene the moment they’re finished – it’s diligent, keeping this small-stakes plot on the rails. Still, the humour comes naturally and often: Louis-Dreyfus is an unimpeachable master of comedy on screen, and the cast around her relish the cleverly observed hilarity of the script (none more so than the always-excellent Jeannie Berlin, as Beth and her sister’s dotty, droll mother).
What this allows Holofcener to do is conjure a vision of educated, anxious middle-class American life that’s constantly revealing and regularly hilarious. Her camera, and in truth her direction as a whole, is unobtrusive: the interest is in people, and the way we squirm when we’re forced to confront our own self-deceptions about the relationships that underpin our lives. It’s not earth-shaking storytelling, and it’s an easy watch that will go down painlessly with a certain older, comfortable demographic – but it’s clever, considered, and short. It’d hardly be fair to ask for more.
You Hurt My Feelings is screening in cinemas from Thursday 15th June. For tickets and more info, click here.