You Hurt My Feelings (Nicole Holofcener)

I dated a comedian for a while. We initially started to hang out with the idea that I would help her write jokes. I would sit there and gaze while she read out these over long diatribes of vague. I nodded and told her it was aallealyl good stuff,f and she didn’t need me to tell her that, just get out and gig more. It took about two years and her disinterest in gigging before I was sincere. ‘You were funny, but your jokes weren’t.’

The fallout of that was massive. Resentment, distrust. The whole notion that I could not give an honest opinion on anything. All over, some pun about a spider with wooden legs or something. That’s not a hook; I don’t remember the rest. 

Nicole has taken a fantastic ensemble in this film and taken these anxious moments and ratcheted them up to almost clinical levels of cringe in ‘You Hurt My Feelings’  With Beth working on her difficult new book and Don, her husband finding his detachment as a counsellor is degenerating into being truly degenerative.  As bBethstruggles with the fact her husband doesn’t like her new book, it sets a great chain of introspection across the whole family.

The usual accoutrements of new york’s predominantly white middle-class life and their absurdities are paraded for tension breaks and some gut-punching moments. Awkward lamps and weed shops are viewed askew in a way that is hard not to compare to Seinfeld. But the emotional depth of the characters makes, as heightened as the characters are, more earnest. Julia Louis-Drefuss Beth is at once vulnerable, anxious, and unconfident while, in the same senses, she can be manipulative, vain for status and quite controlling, particularly when it comes to her son.

As the character’s comforts seem to jar with how they can fixate on a level of acceptance for each other that is frankly unrealistic, it compels its laughs like a raw tooth nerve. To Beth, Don’s quest for face lifts needs to be more prominent in the bookstores, showing how shallow their ‘moral character is’ but also far more relatable.

It’s a fine vein that manages to be both nihilistic and comforting in this humour, making it an excellent afternoon viewing. Now on Amazon, it’s a class-of-class comedy on its own and would go well with camomile between yoga sessions or frustratingly judging your ex-girlfriend’s new beau and his tour. And his fringe show.

I’m sure it’s excellent…

See this film.