You Hurt My Feelings

This wry urban comedy finds the humor, and just enough jolts, in mid-life crisis

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Beth, a writer whose novel, marriage and life all may need revising

You Hurt My Feelings (2023)

Now showing in theaters

The writer and director of You Hurt My Feelings is Nicole Holofcener, a canny, not to say jaded, chronicler of modern dysfunction.  At age 63, she has ten movies to her credit, including Enough Said (2013) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).

Which suggests she’s honed her comedy skills by diligent, cool practice, slowly developing a feel for the gently barbed comeback.

She’s worked on a number of Woody Allen movies, as an extra and in various assistant roles.  Allen’s influence ripples through this script, and the story fits snugly within his oft-exploited milieu.

But she’s not the contrarian Allen is.  His roots in stand-up comedy give him an effrontery that doesn’t seem in Holofcener’s range.  She’s gentler, a hand holder to her jittery urban narcissists.

This movie’s premise is familiar, but it flips expectations.  Comfortable, successful New Yorkers can’t keep their acts together, and find it easier to kvetch than change.  When they discover that success and self-confidence don’t always line up, they start yowling.

No one is who or what they want to be.  Everyone is skating by on half-truths told to themselves and white lies they’re telling those they pretend to be upfront with.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer and teacher who’s published a moderately successful memoir and has now put the finishing touches on her first novel which she’s sent to her agent.

Her husband Don (Tobias Menzies, The Crown) has been wonderfully supportive about the new book, offering positive feedback as Beth has shown him each and every draft.

But Don is lying.  Which Beth learns when she overhears him, in a sporting goods store, confiding to her brother-in-law that he actually doesn’t like his wife’s novel and fears he'd crush Beth’s spirit if he told her as much.

Beth and her sister Sarah overhear Don’s honest, downbeat reaction to his wife’s novel

Beth sneaks away without Don knowing she’s overheard him, and weeps before her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), who ruefully recognizes in the couple’s two-faced fibbing her own finessing of the truth.

Sarah is married to Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor whose career has been hit-and-miss.  Not unlike Don, Sarah hasn’t been able to tell her hard-working spouse that she thinks his work is uneven.

And just as Beth starts wondering whether she’s a real writer, Sarah has grown disenchanted with her job as an interior decorator.

Also keeping his self-doubts hidden, Don, a therapist, hasn’t told Beth that he’s been disappointing his patients, some of whom are either complaining he’s just not hearing them or outright threatening to leave.

No one is who or what they want to be.  And everyone is skating by on half-truths told to themselves and little not-so-white lies they’re telling those they pretend to be upfront with.

The droll undertow here is that all four main characters are mostly mediocre in their chosen professions and have reached the age – mid to upper ’40s – where kidding themselves isn’t going to keep them afloat, much less inspired, any longer.

You Hurt My Feelings confronts these “mature adult” obfuscations not with scorn but a warm, embracing sympathy.  And with even more understanding, by way of the writing, than the characters can muster for themselves.

When Don tells Beth he simply didn’t know how to tell her that her manuscript felt “off” and not her best work, we understand how he both could and couldn’t have told her as much earlier.

Still, Beth’s not having it.  She’s mad at him. Lose-lose, or so it seems.

Don and Beth have to square off before they slowly begin to trust one another again

In fact, not entirely.  Like many couples, they’re still on each other’s side.  Beth gently suggests that Don not undergo mild facial surgery to make himself look younger.

After he does it anyway, it’s both pleasing and true to life that she can’t reproach him and shows us through her facial expressions how she doesn’t want to hurt the man she loves.

There are other well-written and acted scenes.  Don and Beth’s 20-something son Eliot (Owen Teague) is postponing a career commitment by working a dead-end job in a marijuana shop.

An aspiring writer, he’s laboring over a play he’s afraid his self-absorbed parents won’t appreciate, and Teague makes his edge-of-maturity frustration seem heartfelt.

Most refreshingly, there’s a down-to-earth visit from Beth and Sarah to their cantankerous mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin).  She’s aging but carries on and tells both daughters to get over themselves.  No soft-pedaling from her.

The movies’ solid craftsmanship is undeniable, but this isn’t challenging territory for any of the participants.

It’s another New York-set movie where middle-class people, a writer, a therapist, an interior decorator and an actor, face facts they should have confronted long ago.

There’s only so much truly scalding, bracing humor to be mined from their dithering. They’d have to be bolder before you could actually satirize them.

Their confrontations don’t carry any lasting sting, and their resignation doesn’t feel like insight, more like licking their wounds and being kind to one another while their not very deep scars heal.

I don’t want to be unfair to Louis-Dreyfus, but the little I’ve seen of her (I watched Seinfeld only fitfully and could never sit through an episode of the frenetic Veep) has left me with a mixed impression.  She can skillfully time a line, and she’s generous to her fellow actors.

But here, once again, I had trouble separating her pep as an actress – her relish at being on camera glistens in every scene – from Beth’s immersion in her troubles.

Does the actress lose herself in the character or, relying on Holofcener’s crisp writing, is she bending Beth into a version of herself?  I never felt entirely sure, though she remained fun to watch.

Menzies is comic and touching as a therapist whose competence comes under attack from his patients, most bitingly from a couple – hilariously portrayed by real-life husband and wife David Cross and Amber Tamblyn – whose crumbling marriage he can’t save.

Delightfully, it seems as though this falling out will rescue their marriage when therapy didn’t stand a chance.

Holofcener preserves the intimate scale of the movie with swift, trim staging.  For a movie filled with two-shots, she keeps the straightforward plot moving and gets each encounter to land emotionally.

We know how every character feels at the end of a scene.  Yet we can’t be sure where their assorted dilemmas are going to leave them.  And that’s because this script honestly if a little half-heartedly declines to provide pat answers.

It’s not a copout for the movie to finally suggest, unsurprisingly, that life will go on.  By not growing too much, too fast, these privileged whiners have probably matured more than they realize.