You Hurt My Feelings (2023)

It may be less than helpful to the general cause to say that the best movies by director and writer Nicole Holofcener compare favorably to the best Woody Allen movies, before he got to be so hard to take (ca. 1992)—Friends With Money, Enough Said, Please Give, and the others are narrowly focused, good-humored meditations on your vexing life and getting along with the people in it. You Hurt My Feelings has some small flaws but it’s well representative of what Holofcener does. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the center of it as Beth, a professional writer in New York City who teaches adult education classes on writing and has published a memoir about verbal abuse. She’s a little defensive with people, anticipating they won’t take her experience seriously as abuse. She has also recently finished her first novel. Her husband Don (Tobias Menzie) is a psychotherapist possibly edging into burnout. He thinks botox might help. We’re privy to some of his sessions with a few comically neurotic clients. Beth’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) works in a cannabis store and may or may not be an aspiring writer. Beth smokes weed herself but refuses to buy from his store. She also has some unpleasant streaks of racism around this, appearing to believe street crime can break out right there, a jarring note (when it does, it’s even more jarring, the picture’s weakest moment). Beth hangs out a lot with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and sometimes Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed). Beth and Sarah frequently visit their mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin). Around and around these characters go. The cast is big and the cast is good. The movie is essentially built out of conversation, as they shuffle along their appointed daily rounds, getting coffee and trying to figure it all out. The plot turns specifically on Beth and Sarah bumping into Don and Mark out shopping and overhearing their conversation before the two men know they are there. Don is telling Mark that he doesn’t like Beth’s novel and has been lying about it and doesn’t know how to come clean. Yes, it’s the ol’ eavesdropping gambit, that’s right. And then the knotty issue in relationships about how to support a partner’s creativity, tending to shade any criticism sought toward the positive. Because what else are you going to do? You Hurt My Feelings, notwithstanding the occasional pains, is a good time, warm and enjoyable, with some sharp edges of poignance and humor worked into it well.