You Hurt My Feelings - Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

WRITER-director Nicole Holofcener has long been a favourite of mine, with Enough Said one of the best - and smartest - romantic comedies of recent years. With You Hurt My Feelings, she delivers another masterclass in observational social comedy aligned with affecting human drama.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies star as a middle-class New York husband and wife, Beth and Don, whose seemingly perfect marriage is about to be put to the test when one of them is caught in a lie.

The lie in question surrounds the former's new book - a work of fiction, two years in the making, that has yet to capture the imagination of a publisher. When Beth inadvertently overhears Don also expressing misgivings about its quality, her confidence is shattered - both in her ability as a writer and, more potently, in her faith in her husband, who just happens to be a psychotherapist about to experience his own professional crisis of confidence.

Thrown into the mix are Beth's sister (Michaela Watkins), an interior designer questioning her own worth, and her actor husband (Succession's Arian Moayed), who also endures a love-hate relationship with his profession - not to mention Beth and Don's son, (Owen Teague), who is embarking on his own writing career while navigating a break-up with his live-in girlfriend.

As with so much of Holofcener's work, You Hurt My Feelings cleverly dissects the lives of its central characters in shrewdly comical ways, while articulately examining some serious issues: on this occasion, everything from trust and parenting to emotional honesty and pain. In doing so, it isn't afraid to ask some serious questions of its audience that could well kick-start as many awkward conversations post-viewing as it does for its main players.

Holofcener doesn't provide pat answers, either, although she does err on the side of gentle optimism, while nodding to just how messed up the world surrounding its middle class characters really is.

The result is a film that invites as many knowing and ironic laughs as it does laugh out loud ones, without ever losing sight of the human beings a the heart of its narrative. It's an effortlessly appealing movie, shot through with great performances, that invites intelligent debate afterwards - like so much of Holofcener's work before it.