There are many things that make every Nicole Holofcener film a welcome, reliable refreshment but maybe the most important is that she’s one of the very few directors currently working who are expressly an unapologetically interested in making comedies. Sure, deep and complex character psychologies are part and parcel when it comes to her films but all those ineffable ambitions and insecurities more often present themselves in the form of jokes. Holofcener’s latest, You Hurt My Feelings, is chiefly a story about an author, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who overhears her therapist husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), admitting to a friend that he doesn’t like her new book. But the director increases the potential for laughs by stacking her cast so deep that the film almost becomes an ensemble. Menzies is a terrific actor who rarely gets to play comedy; the closest high-profile example is the numbskull knight Edmure Tully he played on Game of Thrones. But as a bad therapist who phones it in for his patients (including Amber Tamblyn, David Cross and Zach Cherry), he’s quietly hilarious. Meanwhile, Jeannie Berlin plays Beth’s mother! Michaela Watkins plays her “much younger” sister! Josh Pais plays himself!
Holofcener has established a reputation–not an unfair one–for making insightful movies about women. But her sympathetic eye for male insecurity and all its attendant pathos and comic potential is very much on display here. And let’s not forget that her last feature, 2018’s The Land of Steady Habits, had a male protagonist. Despite being chiefly about Beth, the middle-aged vanity of Don, who obsesses over his crow’s feet, and of Mark (Arian Moayed), husband to Watkins’ Sarah, a stage actor of longtime middling success, is played for warm laughter.
Of course, Beth is not without self-consciousness concerning her looks either. Much hay is made of the fact that she continues to use an author photo on her book’s dust jackets from years and years ago. And the temptation of eating sweets is revisited after coming up in 2013’s Enough Said, the last time Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus collaborated.
There’s a complaint to be made about You Hurt My Feelings, more so than any of Holofcener’s other films, that it’s overly concerned with the emotional difficulties of people who are unrelatable in their financial status to most Americans. I mean, how can these people be so miserable when they all have such amazing jobs? But, the thing is, rich people have relationship difficulties too and a story about rich characters allows them to focus on them where the rest of us have to find time to work on ourselves in between keeping the bills paid. It might not be the most accurate reflection of society but, for a comedy about interpersonal conflict, it streamlines the storytelling. Not to mention it allows us the pleasure of gazing at well-dressed people in well-appointed rooms.
Enough Said was one of the best films of the year it was released. You Hurt My Feelings may not fully recapture that magic (obviously, we can’t bring back the late James Gandolfini) but it proves that there’s still something left to squeeze out of Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus’ portrayal of people who are often too set in their ways to see the solutions right in front of them. Sometimes, though, we can face the pain enough to change.
