I first fell in love with Nicole Holofcener with a film called Lovely and Amazing, with a dream cast including Brenda Blethyn and Emily Mortimer and Catherine Keener as her daughters.
It was like Woody Allen, relocated to Los Angeles, turned into a woman and without all the neuroses.
Holofcener kept doing it again – Friends with Money, Please Give and Enough Said featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini in his last role – before she got sick of trying to raise money from people who didn’t get it.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus Photo: FilmNation Entertainment
Holofcener jumped ship and went to television, where they loved her. But she made a semi comeback in movies, writing the last act of the Ridley Scott/Matt Damon movie The last Duel.
It was the best part of the movie, needless to say, and while The Last Duel performed disappointingly at the box office, it clearly encouraged her to get back up on that horse.
Her new film is called - with typical Holofcener directness - You Hurt My Feelings, once again starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
This is the Holofcener-verse – people of roughly Nicole’s age, living in blue-state America. It’s New York this time, but it could just as easily be Los Angeles or any middle-class city.
Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth who teaches writing, but who really sees herself as a successful author. Certainly, her first book was pretty successful, though she’s having difficulty getting her new novel off the ground.
Her husband Don – The Crown’s Tobias Menzies – is nothing if not encouraging.
The trouble is Beth’s troubles are first world ones - as she tells her mother, she didn’t suffer enough as a child. Her mother just thinks her agent wasn’t working hard enough.
Meanwhile Don is running out of great things to say about the book, since he has to read every draft Beth gives him.
His own career - he’s a therapist – isn’t exactly going swimmingly either. His clients are starting to complain that he’s not offering quick enough fixes.
Is he any good as a therapist, he wonders? Who says he is - apart from his family of course? Perhaps he needs a new line of work. Or cosmetic surgery.
Louis-Dreyfus is as brilliantly hilarious as Beth.
Her sister Sarah – Michaela Watkins, a younger, happier version of Holofcener’s usual muse Catherine Keener – is going through her own career crisis.
She’s an interior designer with difficult clients. Everyone in this film seems to have difficult clients.
One day, the sisters sneak up on their husbands in the middle of a conversation. Never a good idea.
Hence the title. You Hurt My Feelings is all about how we answer those everyday, unanswerable questions. Do you like my book, do I look fat in this, am I really any good at my job?
Do you want the truth, or do you want a comforting white lie? That’s all there is to the storyline, and it turns out that it’s all you need if you like the characters.
I love Louis-Dreyfus and Menzies anyway, and newcomers Watkins and Adrian Moayed as Sarah’s actor husband Mark are perfect too.
An actor is one of those jobs where, you’d think, rejection and hurt feelings are par for the course. But no amount of rebuffs get you used to it, apparently.
You Hurt My Feelings is the sort of piece Jane Austen might write if she were American and living in New York rather than Bath. It’s what they used to call “a comedy of manners”, back in the days when people actually had manners.
It’s a delight watching characters this good played by actors perfectly attuned to them.
We may want people to tell us the truth, but only if that truth praises us to the skies. The truth will set you free, which is true if by “free” you mean without a friend in the world!
What Holofcener trades in is wit, humanity and in the end, common decency, at a time when all three seem to be a drag on the market.
She makes films about a small, specific community – like Jane Austen did, I suppose – but somehow she makes us part of it.
I love her to bits, needless to say. And even a minor Holofcener like You Hurt My Feelings is still an hour and a half spent in demi-Paradise.
