Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings won’t hurt yours (I promise!)

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s latest, You Hurt My Feelings was the movie I was pining for and didn’t know it. I’ve been watching a wide swath of films lately. Some I’ll write up, some I won’t; but I didn’t realize how starved I was for a human scale, intimate, witty, independent film.

Holofcener is a master of understatement and very often just straightforward honesty. Friends with Money, Enough Said, and Can You Ever Forgive Me? are examples of how we struggle to overcome our self-deceptions and relating more authentically to one another. You Hurt My Feelings is another in that vein that pops along with apparently small stakes until we realize that it’s the seemingly small battles we fight that reflect just how deeply we genuinely feel.

Beth (a never better Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (an equally remarkable Tobias Menzies) have a lovely, committed marriage. She’s a creative writing instructor at The New School, he’s a psychotherapist. She’s finished her first novel and her agent is not moving on getting it published as much as Beth would like; Don is, well, not the most effective of therapists. Beth has doubts about her talent, and her book, despite her memoir having been published to what appears to be solid reviews and Don is getting feedback - some intentional, some not - that he’s not really helping his patients.

Parallel to Beth and Don are her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins, who I saw most recently in Paint, and is even better here) an interior designer and her partner Mark (a spot-on Arian Moayed), an apparently competent actor. Sarah and Mark at crossroads; she is growing increasingly disaffected with her job and Mark is doubting his strengths as an actor and says he no longer loves acting.

What pulls everyone’s disaffection and self-doubt into soft-focus is the damage done when Beth overhears (unintentionally) Don slag her novel. He thinks it’s terrible, despite telling Beth how great he thinks it is and how she should switch agents. This leads to a simmering Beth who calls Don out over dinner with Sarah and Mark, both of whom knew what Mark had said and elected to keep it to themselves rather than bring it up to Mark.

Beth exits the dinner upset and in one of those scenes that we’ve all seen played out and perhaps (probably?) played out ourselves, Beth tells Don that how betrayed she feels and how she no longer can trust him. As much as Don attempts to win Beth over, this is a doomed tactic. Beth had begun sleeping on the couch, reading over her novel’s manuscript while muttering “shit for brains”. 

Some might smugly grin at the bourgeois trappings these people find themselves in (all are at least successful enough to live in New York City; Beth and Don are mid-town and I kind of get the feeling Sarah and Mark might be in Brooklyn); but this where the low stakes are acknowledged when Beth herself says that she knows the world is falling apart and her work is not that important. What does matter is what Don thinks because she values his opinion, she loves and trusts him and with that, comes the expectation of honesty and candor.

Instead, she gets repeated cheers that she’s great and the novel is wonderful. Anyone who has created anything in this world, knows that friends will often fudge, if not exaggerate, what they feel about your work. You learn to take any compliment with a shaker of salt and move on. But we expect/assume more from those we love and while words of encouragement are nice, we often would prefer honest assessments from our loved ones. 

Nevertheless, we often err ourselves and Beth does with their son Eliot who’s been writing a play and refuses to let his mother read it until it’s completed. Owen Teague brings a fullness to Eliot that is as about as naturalistic a performance as I’ve seen this year. Eliot works in a weed shop where Beth drops into visit him but won’t buy from him (she goes to a more expensive place that isn’t as good, according to Eliot) and lavishes praise on his book because she just knows it’s going to be great. 

Later, after Beth and Dan have been trying to come to terms with his error, Eliot shows up at their place to tell them that he and his girlfriend have broken up. The parents respond in the most dunderheaded manner by borderline wondering what Eliot did. It’s not what the intended, we can assume, but it’s how it comes out and after smoothing that out, a new wrinkle appears as Beth heaps praise on Eliot for something else at which point, he says that’s not helpful and lays out how her overweening support of him led him to a place where he routinely second guesses himself. For example, putting him in an advanced swimming class when he was at best, average; or arguing with a teacher to secure a better grade on a paper when Eliot knew that it was graded fairly, but that he felt let down because he had worked so hard on it. All those words of encouragement did was to exaggerate his own sense of  self-worth that may have run into repeated reality checks along the way.

This isn’t lost on Beth or for that matter, Don. After Eliot goes off to bed, the two stay up and have a sweet and sweetly funny (as much of the dialog in this film is) discussion about fibbing to encourage the other person or protect their feelings, extending down to the annual purchases of v-neck sweaters for Don and leaf patterned earrings for Beth. The beauty of all this is that there is no melodrama (well, except for a strikingly out of place armed robbery at Eliot’s dispensary) throughout the film. The characters are so well-written and so well acted that we care about what each says to the other and we come to know them well enough that we recognize ourselves in them and their (and our) attempts to do better.

There’s much in Holofcener’s writing that reminds me of the late Laurie Colwin’s novels, often populated with characters similar to Beth and the rest here. Colwin wrote with a sharp eye and ear but as importantly, with a big heart. She honored each of her characters with all their foibles and we tended to love those characters more because of, not despite those failings. 

There is no big “and what did we learn today” reveal. Beth, Don, and Eliot are at dinner for his parents’ anniversary and very deftly, we quickly see that Eliot no longer feels like the third wheel (an issue he had raised earlier) and that Beth and Don are now recycling their old anniversary gifts as repurposed joke gifts. We’re still not done with what we tell each other.

A later scene has Don returning from having a small plastic surgery procedure to remove wrinkles around his eyes and you can see Beth doing the mental calculus about just how candid she should be when Don asks how he looks. Well, of course, awful: he had just removed his bandages and both eyes look like he’d gone a round with Tyson. Beth says as much, that he doesn’t look so great now, but she’s sure he’ll look fine once they’re healed. Then she waffles a little more and says he looks fine and the final cut in the scene is her look of something like despair as she hugs him closely with his back to the camera. Louis-Dreyfus sells the compromise and wariness of wondering if she did the right thing and silently signaling that, well, Don looks too terrible right now to say he looks great.

In fact, there are grace scenes like this throughout the film where everyone shines with incredibly organic performances. Amber Tamblyn and David Cross show up as a married couple that can barely stand each other and who Don more often just stares at with little more than a “and how did you feel about that?” thrown in. The one thing they agree on is that years of therapy with Don haven’t helped them, so in their last session, Don tells them point blank they should get divorced. I laughed out loud; we’d all been thinking it. Naturally, they’re scandalized and have already asked for their money back from all the previous sessions, but this was perfect.

There are other low-key moments with Beth and Sarah and one with their mom (the ever amazing Jeannie Berlin) where they back and forth over clothes to donate to the homeless, how her daughters spread themselves too thin with volunteering, and the quotidian natterings of an elderly mother either willfully not paying attention or perhaps, well, maybe zoning out from old age. It’s hard to tell from the way Berlin is playing it and she is emphatically not an object of ridicule or pathos, but there’s a sly humor throughout the scene. (As there is throughout.)

One last scene that had kind of sums up how Holofcener brings events full circle is when we see Sarah routinely getting shut down by a client regarding light fixtures. Each one she brings is met with a “nah, sorry, not that one” response. A scene opens with Sarah and Beth sitting on a long, what looks like Southeast Asian bench that Beth doesn’t hide her contempt for, particularly when she finds out it cost $19,000. Later in the sequence, they’re looking at a wall lamp that is pretty ghastly. Beth says “it looks like it’s trying to fuck itself.” Toward the denouement, we see Sarah lifting the same out of its box before her client, whose face lights up and says she loves it! This may not sound much like here in my retelling, but that’s also the point. There’s so much in the film that needs to be seen and heard.

It’s not a deep movie; that’s not what it’s trying to be. But it is a true film. There’s not a note of bullshit in the dialog to be found and it’s all delivered subtly and with genuine humor. If like me, you didn’t know you needed a well-crafted piece of cinema that was going to take a look at honesty and deception in our daily lives with wit (as opposed to laugh out loud funny…though there are a couple of scenes where I very nearly did) and frankly, compassion, You Hurt My Feelings won’t hurt, at all.