Book report
The career of writer-director Nicole Holofcener has been one of immaculate consistency. In terms of quality: almost all of her films fall into a snug little sweet spot of "awfully good and lovely without ever being (or striving to be) bash-you-over-the-head-Great", and while this may sound like a mild insult, that's the sweet spot that fueled the entire film industry for most of its existence. In terms of regularity: with a couple of slight exceptions, her films have been coming out on a rock-steady "every five years" schedule since her 1996 debut, Walking and Talking. And that twice-per-decade routine has helped to throw into relief how consistent she's been in terms of tone, content, human psychology: she has been an unyielding rock over the 27 years of her career thus far, continuing to keep alive the spirit of a particular pretty of witty, urbane indie comedy that wasn't so exceptional in 1996 (she was just better at it than average), but in 2023 feels like a relic from a lost world.
To be clear, I am extremely, extremely grateful for this, and this is where we arrive at the specific 2023 edition of Holofcener's "thing", You Hurt My Feelings. It's a simple film. It overturns no new stones, tries out nothing we haven't seen before. It gets hung up on a couple of things that maybe could have been refined away with a more merciless attitude during the writing or post-production stages, but mostly it's very clean and straightforward. It's not ambitious, and it's not "impressive", but it's also one of the most immaculately satisfying films I expect to see in 2023, a quiet and focused visit with several upper-upper-middle-class New Yorkers as they struggle through their various neurotic tendencies - not new in 2023, not new in 1996, not new since sometime in the '70s, at least, but executed by Holofcener and company with laserlike precision and detail. It's one of those "films about adults" you hear people talk about sometime, generally in the context of "why don't they make those anymore?", but with the added benefit that unlike most of the "films about adults" that do find their way into the world even now, You Hurt My Feelings has absolutely no pretensions to being some kind of major work that has grave things to say about the world and should be rewarded with one or more major award nominations. It's just fun - Holofcener's way of taking us gently to the side and saying, "I have these two characters, I think you'll enjoy spending the next 93 minutes with them". Reader, I did.
The particular characters we'll be hanging out with are a married couple: Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author and writing teacher whose memoirs were received warmly but not ecstatically by critics, and without any significant commercial success, and who has just finished the (hopefully) last draft of her fiction debut; and Don (Tobias Menzies), a mediocre psychotherapist. Orbiting one step outside of them, we find Beth's sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), an interior decorator who has hit a rut of trying to sell the same emptily trendy aesthetic to a succession of bland and tasteless professionals, and her husband Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor who gets work in things you don't see; and then one further step out is Beth and Don's young adult son Eliot (Owen Teague), living with an increasingly impatient girlfriend while he makes a small living working at a marijuana dispensary, and Beth and Sarah's crotchety mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin), whose function in the film is mostly to add color, and also facilitate casting Jeannie Berlin, since post-Margaret, "this is the kind of film that Jeannie Berlin thinks is worthy of her time" has become its own kind of genre, or at least a secret handshake for a particular sort of cinephile.
What conflict the film has is triggered when Beth and Sarah decide to sneak up on Don and Mark buying socks at an upscale athletic store, and so overhear Don stating, without any apparent emotional force behind it, that he's not fond of any of the drafts of her novel, and wishes he'd been more forthright about that way back in the writing and revising process. But that's not really what You Hurt My Feelings is "about", any more than it's about the fact that all four main characters are generally pretty mediocre talents in their chosen professions, and the only reason that this isn't obvious is that they're all doing the kind of work where even if you're mediocre, you can still afford a decent place in the nice parts of New York. It's sort of about the different ways that women and men inhabit the world, but Holofcener is emphatically not interested in any battle of the sexes nonsense. Mostly, it's just an exercise in watching people navigate the complexities of familial relationships (Beth, you'll note, gets one of each: parent, child, sibling, spouse), with a particular eye towards the way that we will tell lies to the people we love because we want them to be encouraged in life, so much so that we do not in fact think of what we're saying as a "lie". More like an optimistic little boost.
This is mostly, in other words, a collection of keen little notes, teased out along an hour and a half worth of scenes that probably could afford to have a bit more dramatic connective tissue than they do; one can defend the film on the grounds that a couple weeks in an average human life (and part of the reason the characters are all such middling figures, I think, is to discourage us from expecting anything of them other than just trying to get through the day) probably doesn't include very many moments of narrative tension, and includes a lot of "we did this before we did that" bobbing from place to place. It's a defense I'm pretty much willing to buy, for that matter, though I'm glad You Hurt My Feelings doesn't try to stretch this out any longer than it's trim running time. But anyway, I started out talking about the keen notes, not the shaggy narrative structure, because that's such an enormous pleasure, and the film just keeps offering it and offering it: scene after scene of smartly detailed, minutely accurate portrayals of how people inhabit the world. Louis-Dreyfus (who was already very good in Holofcener's 2013 Enough Said, and I think is even better here) gives one of those performances that seems to be entirely built around tiny scattered gestures, an accumulation of habits and tics that spill out in the way she looks around rooms, moves her arms, hesitates before talking. There's a moment where she spills crumbs all over a fancy couch at one of Sarah's interior design suppliers, and the way she sweeps the crumbs off (tenting her fingers like a snowplow and shoving the crumbs out from between her legs as she splays her crotch) that's organic and unselfconscious even as it's weird and particular. That kind of thing. And she and Menzies strike all the perfect notes of a couple who've grown comfortable, and thence complacent, with each other's rhythms; they've developed a shared cadence to their dialogue that exactly captures the way that two people who spend a lot of time together will start to absorb each other's verbal tics mostly (but not entirely!) without noticing they've done it.
It's an indescribably pleasant vibe, so much that even the film doesn't pretend for more than three, maybe four scenes (and not consecutive scenes, either) that Don's casual remark about her book might be a marriage-ender. Perhaps not even something that changes a marriage, other than adding a couple of new in-jokes. This isn't really looking to uncover deep truths about humanity, it's just watching some humans putter around, and in so doing manages to be scorchingly true indeed (within the first 24 hours after I saw the film, I had three different "oh, this is like in that movie" reactions to thing in my life, which is three more than I typically expect to get in an entire year of moviegoing). You Hurt My Feelings knows these characters, and the world they inhabit, inside and out: it almost matches 2010's Please Give (Holofcener's best film, probably) in being able to pin down why these people are selfish, not very bright for being so dang educated, and largely responsible for authoring their own suffering in what should be all means by a glass-smooth existence; but it also likes them.
It's certainly not always operating at its peak: the material with Mark feels like one subplot too many, and "actor" is just slightly too fanciful a profession for the vibe the movie otherwise creates. And Owen Teague isn't holding his own with the rest of the cast, making all of Eliot's problems seem a bit trivial and distracting from the grown-ups and their captivating neuroses. Also, it's mostly perfunctory at the level of style: nothing wrong with it, and I could even probably call out several compositions and cuts I liked, but for the most part, craft exists here just to frame the script in the clearest way it can. Which is part of that whole "party like it's 1996" indie spirit this is evoking. Anyway, it's not the perfect version of itself, and the perfect version of itself would still be a bit soft and lightweight; but I found myself thoroughly charmed by You Hurt My Feelings regardless, and I am extremely happy that it exists.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
To be clear, I am extremely, extremely grateful for this, and this is where we arrive at the specific 2023 edition of Holofcener's "thing", You Hurt My Feelings. It's a simple film. It overturns no new stones, tries out nothing we haven't seen before. It gets hung up on a couple of things that maybe could have been refined away with a more merciless attitude during the writing or post-production stages, but mostly it's very clean and straightforward. It's not ambitious, and it's not "impressive", but it's also one of the most immaculately satisfying films I expect to see in 2023, a quiet and focused visit with several upper-upper-middle-class New Yorkers as they struggle through their various neurotic tendencies - not new in 2023, not new in 1996, not new since sometime in the '70s, at least, but executed by Holofcener and company with laserlike precision and detail. It's one of those "films about adults" you hear people talk about sometime, generally in the context of "why don't they make those anymore?", but with the added benefit that unlike most of the "films about adults" that do find their way into the world even now, You Hurt My Feelings has absolutely no pretensions to being some kind of major work that has grave things to say about the world and should be rewarded with one or more major award nominations. It's just fun - Holofcener's way of taking us gently to the side and saying, "I have these two characters, I think you'll enjoy spending the next 93 minutes with them". Reader, I did.
The particular characters we'll be hanging out with are a married couple: Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author and writing teacher whose memoirs were received warmly but not ecstatically by critics, and without any significant commercial success, and who has just finished the (hopefully) last draft of her fiction debut; and Don (Tobias Menzies), a mediocre psychotherapist. Orbiting one step outside of them, we find Beth's sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), an interior decorator who has hit a rut of trying to sell the same emptily trendy aesthetic to a succession of bland and tasteless professionals, and her husband Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor who gets work in things you don't see; and then one further step out is Beth and Don's young adult son Eliot (Owen Teague), living with an increasingly impatient girlfriend while he makes a small living working at a marijuana dispensary, and Beth and Sarah's crotchety mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin), whose function in the film is mostly to add color, and also facilitate casting Jeannie Berlin, since post-Margaret, "this is the kind of film that Jeannie Berlin thinks is worthy of her time" has become its own kind of genre, or at least a secret handshake for a particular sort of cinephile.
What conflict the film has is triggered when Beth and Sarah decide to sneak up on Don and Mark buying socks at an upscale athletic store, and so overhear Don stating, without any apparent emotional force behind it, that he's not fond of any of the drafts of her novel, and wishes he'd been more forthright about that way back in the writing and revising process. But that's not really what You Hurt My Feelings is "about", any more than it's about the fact that all four main characters are generally pretty mediocre talents in their chosen professions, and the only reason that this isn't obvious is that they're all doing the kind of work where even if you're mediocre, you can still afford a decent place in the nice parts of New York. It's sort of about the different ways that women and men inhabit the world, but Holofcener is emphatically not interested in any battle of the sexes nonsense. Mostly, it's just an exercise in watching people navigate the complexities of familial relationships (Beth, you'll note, gets one of each: parent, child, sibling, spouse), with a particular eye towards the way that we will tell lies to the people we love because we want them to be encouraged in life, so much so that we do not in fact think of what we're saying as a "lie". More like an optimistic little boost.
This is mostly, in other words, a collection of keen little notes, teased out along an hour and a half worth of scenes that probably could afford to have a bit more dramatic connective tissue than they do; one can defend the film on the grounds that a couple weeks in an average human life (and part of the reason the characters are all such middling figures, I think, is to discourage us from expecting anything of them other than just trying to get through the day) probably doesn't include very many moments of narrative tension, and includes a lot of "we did this before we did that" bobbing from place to place. It's a defense I'm pretty much willing to buy, for that matter, though I'm glad You Hurt My Feelings doesn't try to stretch this out any longer than it's trim running time. But anyway, I started out talking about the keen notes, not the shaggy narrative structure, because that's such an enormous pleasure, and the film just keeps offering it and offering it: scene after scene of smartly detailed, minutely accurate portrayals of how people inhabit the world. Louis-Dreyfus (who was already very good in Holofcener's 2013 Enough Said, and I think is even better here) gives one of those performances that seems to be entirely built around tiny scattered gestures, an accumulation of habits and tics that spill out in the way she looks around rooms, moves her arms, hesitates before talking. There's a moment where she spills crumbs all over a fancy couch at one of Sarah's interior design suppliers, and the way she sweeps the crumbs off (tenting her fingers like a snowplow and shoving the crumbs out from between her legs as she splays her crotch) that's organic and unselfconscious even as it's weird and particular. That kind of thing. And she and Menzies strike all the perfect notes of a couple who've grown comfortable, and thence complacent, with each other's rhythms; they've developed a shared cadence to their dialogue that exactly captures the way that two people who spend a lot of time together will start to absorb each other's verbal tics mostly (but not entirely!) without noticing they've done it.
It's an indescribably pleasant vibe, so much that even the film doesn't pretend for more than three, maybe four scenes (and not consecutive scenes, either) that Don's casual remark about her book might be a marriage-ender. Perhaps not even something that changes a marriage, other than adding a couple of new in-jokes. This isn't really looking to uncover deep truths about humanity, it's just watching some humans putter around, and in so doing manages to be scorchingly true indeed (within the first 24 hours after I saw the film, I had three different "oh, this is like in that movie" reactions to thing in my life, which is three more than I typically expect to get in an entire year of moviegoing). You Hurt My Feelings knows these characters, and the world they inhabit, inside and out: it almost matches 2010's Please Give (Holofcener's best film, probably) in being able to pin down why these people are selfish, not very bright for being so dang educated, and largely responsible for authoring their own suffering in what should be all means by a glass-smooth existence; but it also likes them.
It's certainly not always operating at its peak: the material with Mark feels like one subplot too many, and "actor" is just slightly too fanciful a profession for the vibe the movie otherwise creates. And Owen Teague isn't holding his own with the rest of the cast, making all of Eliot's problems seem a bit trivial and distracting from the grown-ups and their captivating neuroses. Also, it's mostly perfunctory at the level of style: nothing wrong with it, and I could even probably call out several compositions and cuts I liked, but for the most part, craft exists here just to frame the script in the clearest way it can. Which is part of that whole "party like it's 1996" indie spirit this is evoking. Anyway, it's not the perfect version of itself, and the perfect version of itself would still be a bit soft and lightweight; but I found myself thoroughly charmed by You Hurt My Feelings regardless, and I am extremely happy that it exists.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
