YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. Sometime in the future, a forensic anthropologist trying to understand human society in the year 2023 will wonder how it felt to identify as “bougie” in a world on the brink of collapse. How did people dance on the edge of that abyss? Did they really sublimate the pervasive sense of impending doom by throwing themselves into the consumption of ever more rarified goods and services, optimizing relationships through the exquisitely judicious deployment of white lies? If they’re lucky, the interstellar scholars of the future will be able to watch Nicole Holofcener’s pointed social satire You Hurt My Feelings to assuage their curiosity.
Written and directed by Holofcener, this briskly plotted comedy depicts the mores of New York City’s creative-adjacent upper middle class. Its privileged, well-educated subjects chafe in aspirational limbo, squeezed in between the Total Access enjoyed by the 1 percent and the various forms of 24/7 struggle endured by everyone else. The film is good at delineating the everyday puncture wounds that egos are wont to sustain in this milieu, as well as the tiny perks and affordable luxuries that go into their repair. Really high-quality wool socks, for one — vegan, wicking, emollient and responsibly produced.
Brothers-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor, and Don (Tobias Menzies), a psychologist, are shopping for these very special socks at an outdoor apparel emporium when the crisis that jump-starts the plot goes down. Don’s wife Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer with a successful memoir under her belt, now struggling to get traction with her new fiction project. Thoughtful Don has supported her every step of the way, encouraging Beth to send the manuscript elsewhere when her agent remains less than enamored. But in a gentlemanly tete-a-tete before a spectacular array of the aforementioned socks, Don confides in his bro-in-law: The book’s a dud but he can’t tell Beth because (he accurately surmises) it will cause her to “fall apart.” Both Beth and her sister Sara (Michaela Watkins) overhear this. Emotionally devastated, Beth retreats. The next day, when the foursome gets together for a hilariously awkward dinner, she discloses what she heard. Processing ensues. “It’s not a real lie,” Don explains. “I didn’t want to discourage you.” Sara counsels, “Beth, he loves you even if he doesn’t like your book.” But back at home, Sara wonders about the elisions that sustain her own relationship, asking Mark, “Would you ever lie to me about my designs, my taste?” Everyone around Don and Beth turns out to be expert in crafting artfully composed “white lies,” not least to themselves. Everyone suffers from a sense that the work they do is not as fulfilling as they had hoped. In fact, most dream of quitting the fairly rarified forms of self-actualization that constitute their day-to-day. Mark gets publicly, humiliatingly fired from his role in a theater production, while interior decorator Sara must labor to intuit the design-related whims of her wealthier clients, swapping out one light fixture for another, only to have choice after choice gently ridiculed as basic. “The whole planet is melting and I’m just out here shopping for cashmere walls,” she observes.
Beth and Don’s 23-year-old son Elliott (Owen Teague) is working on his first play, when he’s not working as the manager of a local cannabis dispensary. When crisis eventually arrives, recriminations get aired. Recalling Beth’s enthusiastic cheerleading for his athletic efforts in grade school swim class, he wants to know: “Was I good? Or was my mom a liar?”
Don, who inadvertently instigated the breach of the white-lie regime in the first place, is hardly exempt from woe. Not only is he jonesing for an eye job, framing his peepers with his fingers and pulling to make the wrinkles in the bathroom mirror disappear (“I used to be young and hot!”), but he must also provide couples counseling for a pair of what might be the world’s worst clients. Jonathan and Carolyn (played with droll vitriol by real-life married couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) still hate one another after three years of counseling, and the contempt they parade for one another segues into solidarity only once the two unite in their disdain for Don.
It sometimes seems like Holofcener is probing her characters’ viscera with a sharp instrument, discovering the exact limits attached to their capacity for empathy and charity. But despite the director’s gimlet eye for her characters’ foibles, her narrative touch is a light and generous one. If none of these characters is as morally irreproachable as they would like to be, they are also not entirely as bad as they sometimes fear. That they come across this way has much to do with the presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, an effervescent fount of feeling around which the rest of the talented cast revolves. Showering her surroundings with light, warmth and characteristically daffy grace, Louis-Dreyfus makes us want to laugh not at, but with Beth as she undergoes her trials — keeping us humble, perhaps, by helping us to realize that there, but for the grace of God…. R. 93M. MINOR.
Gabrielle Gopinath (she/her) is an art writer, critic and curator who lives in Arcata. Follow her on Instagram at @gabriellegopinath.
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THE BOOGEYMAN. A monster in the closet that isn’t a member of the GOP for once. PG13. 98M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed due to earthquake damage. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Launching Nigilax̂.
