‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: She Can’t Handle the Truth

I like an entire sentence for a title. Even higher: a complete-sentence title that additionally describes a filmmaker’s chief concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” sums up the Nicole Holofcener expertise: humorous in its wounded bluntness.

It’s the seventh comedy she’s written and directed since 1996. With extra emotional concord and generosity than her different movies, it takes the identical inventory of the way we are able to bruise one another, companions, strangers, youngsters. Her characters — snug New Yorkers and Angelenos — are inclined to lash out; their most well-liked strategy to honesty is brazenness. The new film embraces extra constructive impulses. It’s dishonesty that pursuits her right here, the delicate sort that one character calls, in his protection, “white lies” — what you inform an individual as a result of the reality would simply be a complete factor.

The white liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been studying draft after draft of a novel his spouse, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has been engaged on and telling her how good they’re. The film’s about what occurs after she overhears him, at a Manhattan sporting items retailer, telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that, really, he doesn’t just like the guide, however the fact would kill her. He’s not unsuitable. She’s a weepy wreck for 2 scenes with the sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), satisfied that now she’ll by no means be capable to belief Don. But Holofcener is drawn extra to the method of therapeutic than she is to the wielding of harm.

Twenty minutes move earlier than that sporting items retailer encounter. By that time the film’s already proven us what Beth’s and Don’s lives are like, collectively and aside. They’ve received the form of sturdy, affectionate, unselfconsciously idiosyncratic bond which means they’d simply as quickly share an ice cream cone as a mattress. One factor that’s in all probability saved the wedding agency has been saying “I love this” and “it’s great,” when it’s not. White lies are like Advil for sure relationships; they hold the irritation down. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, up go her quills. She begins sleeping on the couch, ignoring him and distancing herself, and he’s confused. Then one night, in entrance of Sarah and Mark and a tragic bowl of underdressed salad, she tells him that she heard what he mentioned. Then the film does what too few American marriage comedies do: adjudicate the frustration. It turns into in regards to the truths that stream from that unburdening.

Holofcener makes the good move to place Beth and Don within the constructive honesty enterprise. She teaches writing to adults. He’s a therapist. I don’t assume both of them loves what they do, but it surely seems like they make dwelling at it. We get to observe her reply to her 4 college students’ story concepts and, in a single case, to an precise piece, and to look at him with a handful of sufferers. Holofcener’s movies are fleet. Rarely do they exceed the 92-minute mark. But their social resonance springs from a marvel of proficiency.

Every relationship Holofcener provides us — and nearly each scene — explores some kind of candor, some act of leveling: between Don and Beth; Beth and Sarah; Beth and Don and their foggy 23-year-old son (Owen Teague); Beth and her agent (LaTanya Richardson Jackson); Beth, Sarah and their mom (Jeannie Berlin), a widower who lives underneath her daughters’ pores and skin; a pair of married lesbians with whom a tipsy Beth instigates an argument; Sarah, who seems to be an inside decorator, and the significantly specific consumer displeased together with her style in lighting. Plus every part with the scholars, the sufferers and Mark, whose appearing profession is in impartial. I didn’t point out Beth’s fairly profitable memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, whose title you want to hear stumble out of Louis-Dreyfus’s mouth. But Holofcener might have used it for nearly any considered one of her motion pictures.

Her targets, themes and tropes haven’t modified. It’s nonetheless narcissism and private self-importance (Don needs an eye fixed job). It’s nonetheless the emotional disturbances of moneyed, dissatisfied liberals who want Black folks and the poor to make sense of themselves as efficiently good white of us. (Beth and Sarah do complacent volunteer work at a church’s surprisingly stingy clothes giveaway.) No American director’s extra dedicated to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.

The cantankerous, obnoxious and merciless characters are nonetheless right here, too. Most of them are simply sitting on Don’s sofa. The harshest of them is a pair performed by (the really married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. These two hate one another, they usually squirt Don with their bile. Now, in a Holofcener movie, we are able to examine intense marital dysfunction from the compartmental vantage of a psychological well being skilled, someone who in his private life makes use of a totally totally different strategy to speaking together with his spouse. Menzies’ good-natured neutrality right here completely serves each Don the shrink and Don the husband.

Holofcener continues, nonetheless, to be extra fascinated about character than in nice appearing. That is sensible since she wants her casts to approximate some model of us or folks we acknowledge. Which is to say that everyone right here is life-size. Louis-Dreyfus is aware of learn how to discover actual pathos in a rush. She’s a professional at placing throughout Holofcener’s casually cranky snobbery (about new espresso outlets, clear menus and $19,000 benches). Beth’s in the midst of saying one thing racist in regards to the weed store the place her son works when the film’s least plausible incident goes down.

Part of me thought I wished one thing wilder from Holofcener, comedy that felt like disaster. The manner a few of her earlier movies do; the best way it does within the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her research of ego and frailty are nearer to Albert Brooks and Larry David: about breaches of etiquette reasonably then psychological breaks. Still, this appears like a quiet breakthrough for her. She’s put the emotional dynamite away (her steadiest provider of TNT, Catherine Keener, isn’t right here). Instead, this can be a work of self-discipline and construction. It’s a scenario comedy in the most effective, classical sense: These folks’s moral issues are typically ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I needed to watch half of what they’re coping with by way of my fingers.

You Hurt My Feelings
Rated R for language (the painfully sincere sort). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.