Film review: You Hurt My Feelings

Writer Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and psychiatrist Don (Tobias Menzies) are as happy a couple as anyone could imagine, until they aren't, in the film You Hurt My Feelings.

You Hurt My Feelings (R, 93 mins)

Directed by Nicole Holofcener

Since her film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) in which an aspiring writer creates and sells fake personal documents belonging to famous people, director Nicole Holofcener has been fairly quiet. A pity. She has a lot to say about the crumbling Western world and our attempts to get on regardless, trying to be the best we can be, when everything is falling apart. She’s fascinated by the limits of self-belief, the impact of dishonesty in relationships and the effects of lying to protect those closest to us.

That fascination is evident in every shot, every line, every gesture in Holofcener’s new film You Hurt My Feelings. Writer Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and psychiatrist Don (Tobias Menzies) are as happy a couple as anyone could imagine, loving, sharing their icecreams, actually sharing all their food, like a couple of completely compatible birds who’ve mated for life. There’s humour in the way their relationship is portrayed, but this isn’t a romantic comedy. It’s a fairly serious drama that manages to be light-hearted. Quite a feat.

Scenes of Beth and Don in their professional lives, Beth teaching budding writers, Don counselling troubled people, slot in easily between scenes of their marriage, fun times, wedding anniversaries and also scenes in which Beth, in a way that borders on annoying, incessantly asks Don’s opinion of her so far unpublished first novel. Don, who doubts his own effectiveness as a therapist, supports Beth at every step, never expressing any doubts about her novel’s potential, referring to the success of her published memoir and giving her every reason to feel confident about her novel.

Beth is close to her sister Sarah (a perfectly cast Michaela Watkins), a helping kind of person, with a needy husband Mark (Arian Moayed), an out-of-work actor. Sarah runs an interior design business which has demanding, whimsical clients, never seeming to run out of patience with them, or with Mark.

Unexpectedly seeing Don out shopping with Mark, Beth and Sarah overhear Don telling Mark that he really doesn’t like Beth’s novel one bit and that he’s fed up with reading draft after draft of it. Sarah does her best to explain it away but Don’s lying to Beth makes her question everything about her life with him.

Holofcener wrote the brilliant screenplay. It’s blunt, funny and warm, just as well in a film essentially about writing. Even Beth and Don’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) wants to give up his job in a weed shop and write a play, but he’s having a crisis too: at 23, he harshly blames his shocked, bewildered parents for encouraging him to believe he could do anything.

Charming and meaningful, this is a film not only for would-be writers and actors, but also for anyone having a mid-life crisis, anyone who feels stuck in the wrong job and anyone who has struggled with parenting.

Must see.

The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupō qualifies for a free ticket to You Hurt My Feelings.

Movies are rated: Avoid, Recommended, Highly recommended and Must see.