White lies or brutal honesty?
Around the mid-1980s to the early noughties, the middle-class, midlifecrisis relationship comedy was a staple of the art house circuit, laid out by directors such as Woody Allen and Nora Ephron. They featured intellectual, middle-class Manhattanites whose seemingly perfect lives as writers, publishers or theatre and film directors were given uncomfortable, though funny jolts by midlife neurosis and anxieties that necessitated angsty conversations in Central Park, the Met or the booths of reliable New York eateries.
Then the age of the bombastic fantasy blockbuster came along and the midbrow, middle-class comedy vanished, seeing directors scramble to finance their films and often failing to find theatre releases.
That has been the case for Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, which failed to make the cut for theatrical release here. It’s a shame it didn’t get a chance because it’s a solidly executed, wellwritten, excellently acted addition to the genre that offers, with humour and warmth, an effective examination of a relatable human crisis in the lives of the comfortably bourgeois characters.
Julia-Louis Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer whose memoir about the “underexplored horrors of verbal abuse” has set her up with a job teaching creative writing to college students, even if her follow-up book, a novel, is taking her a long time to complete. Luckily, Beth is supported by her husband Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist who’s beginning to worry that the lines on his face
are making him look old and tired, and that he may not be as good at his job as he once thought he was.
The couple’s precocious 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is working on a play his parents have no doubt will be brilliant if they ever get a chance to read it. If so, it will mean he’ll be able to stop working his day job in a marijuana dispensary.
Beth’s only real friend and confidante is her equally frustrated interior designer sister Sarah (Michele Watkins), who tries her best to manage her sibling’s anxieties while fending off her own uncertainties about her career and the emotional ups and downs of her struggling actor husband Mark (Arian Moayed).
When Beth and Sarah overhear Don telling Mark he’s only encouraging Beth’s new novel to keep her happy, as he actually hates the book, Beth’s world is thrown into turmoil by her husband’s deceit.
Sharply observed with well-quipped jokes and just enough emotional truth to make it more bitter than sweet, it’s a good film about the white lies we tell our loved ones to help them navigate difficult moments and how doing so is sometimes a more important key to a successful, enduring partnership than absolute honesty.