You Hurt My Feelings is Flat and Dull

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (2023)

Directed, written, produced by Nicole Holofcener

A24, 93 minutes, R (entirely for F-bombs)

★

 

You Hurt My Feelings isn’t a terrible movie, merely a relentlessly flat one. Director Nicole Holofcener, also wrote and produced a movie about an overdone subject and failed to do anything new with it. How many flicks have you seen in which a character gets in trouble for telling a white lie that escalates into a black one? If the moral of this tale is “tell the truth or a lie will come to bite you,” I doubt you’ll be tempted to throw confetti into the air to celebrate such a unique revelation.

 

I saw this one in the “new to video” bin at the local library, had never heard of it, and took it home because I like actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She plays Beth, a successful memoirist who is married to Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist. The two are so devoted to one another that they finish each other’s sentences, share their food, and order one ice cream cone between them. All of this is to the shock of their grossed out 23-year-old son Elliot (Owen Teague). One wonders how Elliot got to be 23 without previously noting said behavior. Beth has a bad case of creative paralysis, which is obvious to her, her publisher, and a rival firm–both of whom reject the manuscript. She’s inconsolable, so Don tries to console her by telling her that her critics are idiots and that she’s a wonderful writer. 

 

Poor Don. He’s an ineffective burnt-out therapist, but it’s his fetish for socks that does him in. After lunch with his brother-in-law Mark (Arian Mayed), who has just been fired from his acting job, they cross a New York City street and enter a sock shop, where Don confesses that Beth’s latest writing effort is lame. Unbeknownst to either, Beth and her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) go into the store, as Beth wants to surprise Don with a new pair of socks. She overhears Don’s remark and silently exits. She is crushed and is convinced that her husband is a liar who can no longer be trusted. Sarah tries to soothe things, but fumbles the effort.

 

Excuse me for being a heel, but this hardly seems like an earth-shattering, irreconcilable situation to me. Toe the line and deal with it, say I. Instead, Beth festers like a foot fungus, treats Don like a worn-out insole, and begins to wonder if their marriage is over. About the only thing that redeems this movie at all is that scenes of inept therapy, both Don’s and that of the marriage counselor, are pretty funny. It’s even funnier to imagine that in the Big Apple that such lame shrinks could stay in business long enough to pay the rent. I’m led to believe there are a lot more star therapists than sock stores in Manhattan, but whadda I know?

 

Will Don and Beth forgive each other? In a movie whose dramatic moment occurs in a sock shop, you can guarantee that this “comic drama” will err on the side of weak comedy rather than gut-wrenching drama. Of course they do. So why not pull up your… never mind. To top the shared ice cream cone with an over-sweet maraschino cherry, not only does Beth revise her new memoir to great acclaim, her n’er do well son Elliot churns out a successful play with a role for Mark.

 

I know I’m not supposed to look for Logic 101 in a comedy, but I didn’t buy a thing in You Hurt My Feelings. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has all the emotional affect of a zombie, and Menzies is more hangdog than Huckleberry. If the therapy hadn’t been so bad, I might have fallen asleep. You Hurt My Feelings is a bad title, a bad script, and bad direction. For the record, even the socks looked boring.

 

Rob Weir