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 

 

 

 

The Roses a Good Guilty Pleasure

 

 

THE ROSES (2025)

Directed by Jay Roach

Searchlight Pictures, 105 minutes, R (language, sexuality, violence)

★★★★★

 

The Roses is a British remake of the 1989 film War of the Roses, which starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Doulgas. Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of remakes, but this one surpasses the original. It’s a rare occasion in which the Brits remade an American film rather than vice versa. That’s good news for viewers, as British actors are generally more skilled than American celebs.

 

Without getting bogged down in history, the title pays homage to a 30-year struggle over the English throne between two cadet branches of the Plantagenet family, the House of York (whose emblem was a white rose) and the House of Lancaster (red rose). If you care, the winner was the Tudor family. Neither The Roses nor The War of the Roses was about that bloody 15^th century struggle over the kingship, but both movies had plenty of vitriol and fireworks.

 

The Roses refer to a modern family, Ivy (Olivia Coleman), a talented chef wannabe, and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch), who hopes to become a major architect–two dreamers who were mad (made?) for each other. They meet in London, fall passionately in love, share their respective dreams of moving to the United States, marry, and ten years later, live in a spectacular home in Mendicino, California, with their twin children, Hattie and Roy. They exude the American Dream, aside from differing parenting skills: Ivy bribes the kids with gooey desserts and Theo is an exercise drill sergeant-as-dad. They have money, drink great wine, throw elaborate dinner parties, and have good friends, especially Amy (Kate McKinnon) and Barry (Andy Samberg), and Sally (Zoë Chao) and Rory (Jamie Demetriou).

 

They gather to celebrate Theo’s unveiling of the new naval history museum. It is truly spectacular, but it looks… well … a bit overdone, with its sweeping cantilevers and sail-like appendages. A freak tempest reduces the entire building and Theo’s career to rubble. At lightning speed, he is ridiculed as a dangerous egoist, becomes the butt of cutting jokes, and is blacklisted. The only question left is who gets sued. Ivy steps in and works like a plow horse to keep the family afloat. Theo has built her a nice restaurant, but to recover from the debt they are in, Ivy needs to upscale. A depressed, unemployed Theo passes his days drilling the twins into super-athlete shape. Soon, Ivy is a rising star in the food industry. (Make sure you’ve eaten before watching the film, lest you start stuffing sugar down your throat!) She’s on TV and magazine covers, is the toast of every city she visits, and opens new restaurants galore. Is Theo envious of her success? You bet your pencils and protractor he is.

 

Lionization notwithstanding, Ivy has become an absentee wife and mother. The war of the Roses begins with toxic jealousy, barely survives failed therapy, flirts with divorce, and settles into a Hatfields versus the McCoys feud in which each tries to outdo the other in cruelty. If it sounds grim, it’s not. Despite the dangerous and insidious games on the screen, The Roses is quite funny as long as you remind yourself, “It’s just a movie.” The movie’s success –and its big surprise ending – is due to the skill of Coleman and Cumberbatch. Like the stage-seasoned actors they once were, each has been schooled in nuance, accents, and drama.

 

Some audiences were turned off by the movie’s “meanness.” Sorry, viewers, but that’s on you, not the script or the direction of Jay Roach. The film is a hybrid black comedy and satire and if you don’t get the latter, you won’t get the humor. All those amazing houses and sets weren’t there to make you envious, they were lampoons of materialism and unfiltered ambition. The “war” of the Roses, like most actual wars, could/should have been avoided. Pay attention to Ivy’s desserts, which in their own way, are as architectural as Theo’s designs. You might wish to dive into them, but they are splendid illusions, inedible manifestations of an unchained id. Even sex is treated this way. Kate McKinnon is an out-of-control harpy who puts the moves on Theo no matter who is in the room. She’s over-the-top, but so is everyone else. The Roses isn’t a film, but it’s a very good guilty-pleasure movie.

 

Rob Weir