Nicole Holofcener’s films generally hinge on a minor revelation or broken taboo whose shock wave is amplified by the quietude of the mannered surroundings. In Please Give, a woman gives her leftovers to a man she believes is homeless but who’s actually waiting for a table at the restaurant she’s leaving. Friends with Money is stippled with angst-inducing social discrepancies due to one member of a friend group being less wealthy than the others. For her latest, You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener pins the story on an anxious author who overhears her husband say how much he dislikes the draft of her first novel. And yes, her feelings are hurt.
If no higher stakes are necessary, credit Holofcener’s assured handling of the material and her dexterous cast. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writing teacher and memorist of modest success, as a lightly neurotic and somewhat lost soul who doesn’t quite realize how much of her life depends on the approval of others. Toggling between hyperbolic and apologetic, Beth verges just close enough to self-parody to keep her predicament from being given undue seriousness. At the same time, she’s truly crushed by the chance discovery that her therapist husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), has only been pretending to like her unfinished new book. Holofcener has the rest of her cast perform their roles in a similar earnest-yet-not manner.
The other main characters all face their own crucibles. Don’s confidence as a therapist is undermined by hearing a patient (Zach Cherry) mutter about how useless he finds their sessions. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), has started to despise her job as an interior decorating for the vapid rich, while her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), no longer believes that he wants to be an actor. Though materially comfortable and in the kind of professions deemed appropriate for their social class, they’re all on the downslope of middle age and generally annoyed with where they’ve ended up. Even Beth and Don’s twentysomething son, Eliot (Owen Teague), is dissatisfied and unmoored. But his complaints—girlfriend problems, irritation at Beth for not liking that he works in a pot dispensary—are viewed in a more comedic light by a film whose perspective is unapologetically on the side of the grownups.
On one level, You Hurt My Feelings is a relationship story about trust. After days of being snippy and passive aggressive toward Don, Beth finally confronts him—at a hilariously uncomfortable birthday dinner for Mark—about what she believes is a pattern of lying and what he contends is really just his way of expressing love. Ultimately, though, the film deals more forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.
Each of the main characters wrestles with whether they should keep on with their jobs. Sarah and Mark’s crises are played mostly for laughs, and Beth’s comes across with humor but also a degree of empathetic pathos. But Don’s predicament, as the one of the four whose talents can be viewed somewhat objectively by the audience (we never hear Beth’s writing and can only judge Sarah’s skill at her job by the different lamps she presents to a fussy client), is presented with more depth and nuance. As a result, it appears possible that he may actually be bad at his job. We see him mistake one client’s family history for another’s and be confronted by one extremely bitchy couple (played by real-life husband and wife David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) demanding a refund on the thousands of dollars they spent on therapy over the years.
There are several sequences here that rank among the best in Holofcener’s work, particularly the ones set inside Beth’s writing class, where her students’ farcical sense of themselves and their work make her perspective seem grounded in comparison. Ultimately, Holofcener gets most of the film’s comedic mileage out of showing Beth failing to find validation in her work, whether realizing that none of her students are aware that she’s a published author or being crushed by her agent’s disinterest in her novel. That brand of amusingly deflated narcissism is a Louis-Dreyfus specialty and it constitutes a large part of what makes You Hurt My Feelings work.
It would be easy to dismiss the film as dealing only with the minor problems of the cossetted bourgeois. Which would be fair, to some degree, though it would also involve dismissing much of the work of everyone from Woody Allen to Mia Hansen-Løve. Bright, funny, and observant, You Hurt My Feelings presents people wrestling with admittedly small problems, but does so honestly and without inflating those issues into anything more than the stuff of everyday life.
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An agent being disinterested in an author’s novel is neither here nor there. Being uninterested, though, would be harder to bear.