You Hurt My Feelings

(Nicole Holofcener, USA, 2023)

I am not a big fan of Nicole Holofcener’s films and, to be frank, I have not tracked them assiduously. What I have seen (such as Lovely and Amazing [2002]) has not much inspired me to seek further and deeper. I regard her as a television-oriented director (and not merely because she has worked in that medium), in the sense that scripting and direction of actors appear to take precedence over all other aspects of cinematic style – and the rest (including musical accompaniment) settles into a merely ‘pleasing backdrop’ of social décor/ambience.

And in terms of ‘thematic attack’ – the structuring of her themes through character interactions and low-intensity plot incidents – Holofcener’s work seems to sit in a relatively bland post-Woody Allen tradition (this is a description she may not appreciate!), without the crafty cleverness that Allen achieves at his best, for instance A Rainy Day in New York (2019).

However, as I watched You Hurt My Feelings – and yes, it’s well-written and well-acted – I felt an itch: I grabbed pad and pen and started sketching a diagram, as things unfolded, of how its themes were announced, pinpointed, developed, resolved. That kept me intrigued and involved to the end.

The character-network in play here is not huge. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, especially impressive) is a writer, struggling to compose the follow-up to her first book, a successful memoir titled I Had to Tell It – the transition to fiction (and away from the sure-fire, self-help market) is letting her down. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a psychotherapist; a little as in Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), a line of patients offer the spectator (and, eventually, Don himself) a handy mirror to his personal problems. Beth and Don have a young-adult son, Eliot (Owen Teague), whose confession of relationship-breakup doesn’t quite elicit the empathetic parental reaction he hoped for; class-aspirational issues are at play (Mom disapproves of him working in a déclassé weed shop) …

Beth also has a sister, interior designer Sarah (Michaela Watkins), whose husband, Mark (Arian Moayed) – another struggling artist, in this case an actor – is also Don’s best pal. To that tight-knit group is added the mother of Beth and Sarah, Georgia (Jeannie Berlin), a wonderful character who resists and complicates the usual getting-old-and-forgetful-and-cranky stereotype, while also incorporating it.

Where is the motor, the centre of this film in thematic terms? It is not immediately flagged (a welcome change in this loose urban-comedy-of-contemporary-manners genre). For a good while, we cruise through a set of interactions, noticing certain repetitions, crossovers and patterns: the business of Beth and Don always sharing food, for instance; the rituals of giving and receiving clothing-accessory gifts; a man in couple-therapy who never looks at his wife; or the fact that Don is tending to confuse his clients/patients and getting their case-histories mixed up – and starting to get wind of less-than-flattering aside-evaluations from these folk as they shut down the Skype or exit the door. Beth, too, has clients: her writing students at New York’s New School, who seem to have no awareness whatsoever of their teacher’s curriculum vitae (an extremely common teaching experience, I could have assured her!). And an especially intriguing thread, harping on specific word-choices considered ‘bad’ or at least not ‘apt’ in social intercourse: that covers everything from ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ to ‘lady’ and ‘cunt’.

But where is all this going, beyond some everyday mosaic of tics, foibles and minor neuroses? The clincher – at last, the initiating incident that screenwriter-analysts are trained to swoop upon! – comes 25 minutes in. Beth and Sarah spot Don and Mark in a store, and sneak up to surprise them … and find themselves hearing Don’s confession that Beth’s new work-in-progress is not terribly good (“I don’t like it”). Beth slinks away, shattered: her feelings are now hurt, to the extent that she no longer believes she can trust the person to whom she felt closest. Or, to put that another way: she depended on his approval, and now she faces a torrent of self-doubt (she takes to manically scribbling “shit for brains” all over the pages of her manuscript-in-process).

This catastrophic incident of eavesdropping opens up a dynamic figuring across all the relationships, personal or professional, depicted in the film: the degrees of lying that enter into ongoing interactions, and if (or to what extent) that practice can be justified. Beth, for example, has always hated those darn earrings that Don buys her every year: is it OK, or understandable, that she never admits it? What about a writer and the advice from her/his literary agent/manager: what’s the line there between active encouragement and indifferent tolerance? Should Sarah tell her real-estate-driven clients how much she thinks their design sense sucks? And Don with his patients: what does he really gain – or achieve – from nodding along politely and not saying what he critically feels about their delusions? (Echo, again, of Moretti: these patients feel increasingly entitled not only to openly criticise their distracted shrink, but also, in this case, to demand their many thousands of dollars in fees back!) Have we stumbled onto that dreaded psy-fad that apparently (for five minutes) explains all aberrant behaviours in the modern world: gaslighting? Beth even utters that black-magical word …

There are further twists and turns in proceedings, and further work-outs of the thematic core and its varied peripheries – but I’ll leave viewers to discover them, if so inclined. I can allusively note, without spoiling anything that happens in-between, that the final shot revives a trope of which I’m fond in the broad ‘relationship comedy’ genre: Albert Brooks did it brilliantly in Mother (1996), ending on a simple, continuous activity (in Brooks’ case, typing on a computer) that placidly signals a resolution of turbulence and a blessed return to everyday enjoyments.

© Adrian Martin 22 July 2023