You Hurt My Feelings (Preview)
Reviewed by Kevin Lally

Produced by Anthony Bregman, Stefanie Azpiazu, Nicole Holofcener, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus; written and directed by Nicole Holofcener; cinematography by Jeffrey Waldron; edited by Alisa Lepselter; production design by Sally Levi; music by Michael Andrews; starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, Jeannie Berlin, David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, Zach Cherry, and Sarah Steele. Color, 93 min., 2023. An A24 release.

“I’m not the plot girl,” writer-director Nicole Holofcener recently admitted to Vogue, one of several possible reasons why You Hurt My Feelings is her first theatrical feature since Enough Said in 2013. Her narratives are driven by character interactions rather than twists and reversals; if there’s a plot hook, as there is in Feelings and Enough Said, it can be encapsulated in one sentence. Her comic sensibility is understated and observational—there are few easy laughs in her films, more smiles of recognition. Although her low-budget comedies generally turn a small profit, she’s never had a huge hit. But gradually, over the course of her seven features, she’s established her own singular voice and emerged as one of America’s most engaging and rewarding filmmakers.

The aforementioned hook in You Hurt My Feelings is there in the title. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, the author of a successful memoir who’s been struggling with her first novel. She’s in a loving relationship with her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) and adores her twenty-three-year-old son Elliot (Owen Teague), an aspiring playwright who clerks at a cannabis shop. All is well on the domestic front until Beth overhears her husband admitting to her brother-in-law that he doesn’t think much of her novel. The revelation is so jarring to Beth that she begins to question the very foundation of her marriage.

From this simple premise, Holofcener spins off several variations on the theme of human fragility and how often our definition of self is intertwined with our career choices. Beth is far from the only character here suffering from insecurity. Don is disturbed by the fact that he’s starting to mix up his patients’ histories, and the several comical sessions we witness seem to support his increasing suspicion that he’s not a very good therapist. Beth’s sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) is an interior designer who’s losing patience with her customers’ arbitrary demands. (“It’s like the whole planet is melting, and I’m just out shopping for cashmere walls,” she laments.) Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed) is an actor whose meager confidence is shaken when he’s fired from a Broadway play in rehearsals. And Elliot is just as unsure of his literary talent as his mother, blaming his parents for being too coddling and uncritical.

Like many of Holofcener’s films, You Hurt My Feelings has autobiographical roots. She recently told The Washington Post that it came out of the question, “Can I date someone who doesn’t get my films? Because that happened and, you know, it didn’t work out. I really wanted to be the person who didn’t care. I really wanted to be the person who…could separate those things. But I can’t. I think that was the beginning of this.”

The film also revisits some motifs from Holofcener’s first feature, Walking and Talking (1996). That comedy also features a flailing therapist, played by Anne Heche, and includes several amusing sessions with various oddball patients. And, in a major subplot, one character’s feelings are decidedly hurt when he hears a phone message referring to him as “the ugly guy.” The “hurt feelings” theme is also semi-autobiographical: in a 2018 New Yorker interview, Holofcener recalled hearing an audience member say, “When will this end?” during a screening of her first student film at NYU. That prompted her stepfather, film producer Charles H. Joffe, to suggest she might want to rethink her career plans.

Holofcener’s stock in trade is human frailty and disconnections, especially among the largely white and upper-middle-class types who people her films (though her leads have included a cleaning woman, a masseuse, and an unsuccessful knickknack artist who takes a job at a one-hour-photo shop). Her characters can be cutting, thoughtless, and self-absorbed, yet we enjoy being in their company, thanks to her gently satiric wit and her spot-on dialogue.

In 2010, Holofcener told Los Angeles magazine that Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is the film that most inspired her to become a writer–director, and you can see a connection in the deadpan humor that sneaks up on you. The sequence in which Don’s patients Jonathan and Carolyn (real-life couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn as a constantly bickering husband and wife) demand their money back for years of unsuccessful therapy could have been a vintage Nichols and May sketch. There’s also a lot of Larry David in the way Holofcener’s characters obsess over trivial annoyances—Beth and her mother (Jeannie Berlin) fight over the latter’s insistence that she wrap leftover potato salad in tin foil; ornery Jonathan complains that Don’s wastebasket is always full…

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Kevin Lally is the former executive editor of Film Journal International and Boxoffice and author of Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4