Nicole Holofcener may be the voice behind You Hurt My Feelings, in that she is the film’s writer and director. But it’s star Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ career history that most informs what this film is about and how it’s about it. In 2020, Louis-Dreyfus starred in Downhill, the American remake of Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, which presented numerous characters’ perspectives on an impulsive act of cowardice by a father and husband. You Hurt My Feelings is similarly an essay on the social interactions between human beings – and in a way, it feels a bit like an episode of Seinfeld, New York City setting and all, drawn out to feature length.

The topic at hand, filtered through a half-dozen characters, is how we are quick to offer praise to a loved one on something they’ve done, be it an artistic achievement, athletic accomplishment or win at work – even if we think the thing in question isn’t actually very good. What else do you say to a loved one who hands you the manuscript they’ve been working on for two years except that it’s great? The answer is: nothing. You cannot say you don’t like it.

Sure there are some brazen and self-actualised individuals out there who pride themselves on delivering tough love in this scenario, but that doesn’t describe most of us. And it does not describe Tobias Menzies’ Don, husband to Louis-Dreyfus’ Beth. He’s a therapist, she’s a writer whose memoir was warmly received, and now she’s trying to follow up with a work of fiction. He says he likes it. He says it’s great. When one publisher is cool on it, he suggests taking it to another. Except when he’s alone with his brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed), partner of Beth’s sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), he confesses that he just doesn’t like the book. Only trouble is, Beth and Sarah were sneaking up to surprise them in a store – right as this was being uttered.

Beth doesn’t immediately tell Don she heard his true thoughts, but the shift in her attitude toward him reveals something is wrong for sure. Don’s getting it from all sides, actually, as he’s got a couple in marriage counselling (David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) asking him to refund two years’ worth of his fees after failing to help them, and he also overhears the mutterings of a dissatisfied patient (Zach Cherry) in the moments just before their Zoom cuts off. These aren’t the only two frustrated professionals in the cast, as Mark has doubts about his worth as an actor and Sarah is continually trying and failing to find the right lamp for one of her displeased interior decoration customers. Not to mention Don and Beth’s son, Eliot (Owen Teague), who is trying to write a play, but is scared to death of anyone reading it for reasons that should be obvious by now.

And maybe that’s the trouble with You Hurt My Feelings: it’s a little obvious. The attempted sparing of feelings practised as a white lie by supportive partners/parents is not just an underlying theme of You Hurt My Feelings; it’s the whole thing. By the time we encounter the seventh or eighth variation on this social nicety, we fully understand this sort of thing is universal. But we understand it’s universal primarily because Holofcener has put her finger on a true phenomenon that many of us, especially parents, deal with every day. She undercuts some of the shrewdness of her observation by not only repeating it throughout the narrative, but even having characters explain to each other the irony of blaming one person for this sort of behaviour and then doing the exact same thing to someone else.

Thank goodness the whole thing is so appealing otherwise. Now 62 years old, Louis-Dreyfus is improbably in her movie acting prime, having recently taken on a recurring role in the MCU in addition to continuing her focus on movies like You Hurt My Feelings – You People from earlier this year has a similar focus on social awkwardness and hurt feelings. Menzies, who did two years on The Crown, makes a credible American, and a real punching bag in this film. He truly seems to be a shit therapist, at least according to his patients, though it’s heartbreaking how nice he is. Louis-Dreyfus and Watkins were born to play sisters, and their doting on their aged mother (Jeanie Berlin) provides a cute respite from the recurring thematic material. (Though, the film points out, you aren’t supposed to call old people cute or adorable.)

It’s clear Holofcener is also continuing to try to work out the guilt of the well-to-do Upper Westsider. She made a whole movie about the charitable impulses of wealthy New Yorkers in Please Give, and she dabbles in those ideas here as well, as Beth and Sarah volunteer providing clothes to the homeless. Holofcener clearly wrestles with the artistic validity of making a movie about these “world’s smallest violin” moments – oh boo hoo, your husband doesn’t like your writing. She even acknowledges it with a line of dialogue when Don observes that the whole world is falling apart and this is what his wife is focusing on.

But not all art can take on the weight of the world, and it’s true that there is a melancholy side to the observational comedy that Seinfeld would have handled within the realm of the 30-minute sitcom format. Everybody may do it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some sort of essential betrayal in perpetrating this sort of chronic white lie – the G-word “gaslighting” is even evoked – on someone you are meant to care for more than anyone else in the world. If you can’t trust someone like that to give it to you straight, who can you trust?

 

You Hurt My Feelings is currently playing in cinemas.