YOU HURT MY FEELINGS - Mark Reviews Movies

You Hurt My Feelings, A24

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 25, 2023

With You Hurt My Feelings, writer/director Nicole Holofcener takes a very sitcom-esque premise and turns it into a gentle comedy about deep-seated insecurity and self-doubt. Filled with very fine performances and smart writing, this film is much funnier than its simple setup probably has any right to be, and that's mostly because Holofcener has tapped into something so recognizably human.

It is, for the most part, about how the smallest thing can become so significant in one's mind as to fill a person with uncertainty about a career, relationships, and life in general. For Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), it's overhearing someone say something negative about the book she has been working on and struggling with for a couple years. That's bad enough for almost any creative type, yet making the slight so much worse is the fact that it comes from a loved one, whom she wholly trusts and whose opinion she deeply respects.

That's the major through line of this story, but before it arrives, Holofcener establishes an entire family dynamic of people who just as on the edge of rethinking their entire lives on account of some particular challenge or off-handed comment. Behind that, though, there's years upon years' worth of frustration for these characters, and we can sense it in just about every moment of these performances.

Take Beth's husband Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist who seems very certain of himself. It's telling, by the way, that the guy who seems to have it most together of this cast of characters—which is only saying so in relative terms—is the one who isn't creatively driven. He works in clear, if somewhat intangible, results. If Don's clients walks away feeling better about themselves and their lives, he has done his job properly.

Such is not the case for Don at this moment in his career, though. We meet him counselling an especially hostile couple (played with just the right level of hatred and, so that anger never becomes too uncomfortable, perfect comic timing by Amber Tamblyn and David Cross), who apparently have been at the end of their shared rope for years and over the course of multiple therapists. Don can't help them, partly because they seem incapable of help but also because he's not exactly listening.

The guy even has trouble remembering his patients, mistaking one woman's father for another client's and not recalling that Jim (Zach Cherry) wants to talk about the troubles he has been having with his siblings. When Don overhears the second patient call him an "idiot" and his sessions "pointless," he starts to realize that, maybe, there's something wrong with him.

The central conflict is between Beth and Don, who are immediately portrayed as a sappily happy couple, buying what seem to be the perfect anniversary presents and even sharing food, much to the embarrassment of their young adult son Eliot (Owen Teague). The problem arrives when Beth, trying to surprise Don by sneaking up on him at a store, overhears him saying that he doesn't think her new book, her first novel, is much good. The silent and utter devastation Louis-Dreyfus shows is equally hilarious and heartbreaking, and the bulk of Holofcener's story rests in that awkward in-between tone of recognizing something so painfully relatable that we almost have to laugh.

What follows in the story, of course, is a lot of evasion, as Beth gives her husband the cold shoulder and dreads confronting him with what she heard, as well as multiple slights—an agent who doubts the book will sell and a writing class who hasn't read Beth's memoir—that only pile up for her. Eventually, the subject of Don's "betrayal" comes to a head at an already uncomfortable birthday dinner for Beth's brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed).

One of the major reasons the film rises above its situational comedy roots is the way Holofcener provides us with layers and levels of the sort of dissatisfaction, insecurity, and fear Beth is experiencing. The filmmaker treats those characters with almost as much attention and care as she does her central duo.

There's Mark, an actor who has performed in plays, television, and movies but is becoming disillusioned with the notion of ever catching his big break. There's also Beth's younger sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), an interior designer who is starting to find her job of picking out expensive and elaborate pieces for picky, tasteless, and wealthy people to be a complete waste of time, effort, and whatever hope she might have left for everything.

Even Eliot, who works at a marijuana dispensary while penning his first play, is part of this equation of uncertainty. He's convinced Beth has given him an unrealistic perception of his talents, and beyond that, Eliot has grown to believe that his parents love each other much more than they love him. If much of Holofcener's humor here resides in uncomfortable truth, the way in which Beth instinctually proves her devotion to her son is a scene that's a very funny and, somehow, very lovely piece of physical comedy.

To be sure, You Hurt My Feelings is slight in terms of its characterizations, comedy, and theme, but within the film, that almost comes across as an inherent critique of just how relatively good these characters have it otherwise. Maybe that's not the point at all, though, but even if that isn't the case, this remains an insightfully humorous depiction of how much support most people need from others, if only because we so often aren't willing or able to encourage outselves.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products