The film considers her tailspin both seriously and with wry amusement, as so many moments of life should probably be regarded. Beth acknowledges that this is ultimately a petty, narcissistic concern, but it’s her petty and narcissistic concern, and it’s what she’s feeling. Holofcener allows for plenty of real emotion to inform her characters-when Beth overhears her husband, it arrives as a genuine crisis, not a comedy-movie complication, an excuse to zanily freak out. She’s got a light touch, a humane one too. Holofcener weaves these people and their problems together in delicate fashion, guiding us toward her thematic conclusions in a way that never feels starchy, didactic, too lesson-oriented. It’s a funny topic for a film, a particular sub-facet of human exchange that Holofcener finds amusing and insightful ways to dramatize. More broadly, she’s musing on what it is to encourage a loved one along on their path, whether that’s out of genuine belief in their pursuit with some white lies meant to protect them from, well, hurt feelings or an overconfidence in their abilities. In the case of You Hurt My Feelings, she is looking at self-doubt, particularly when it comes to career. Holofcener’s films tend to center on a theme.
Beth is crushed, and begins to wonder if their trusting bond has really ever been what she thought it was. Though outwardly supported by her husband, therapist Don ( Tobias Menzies), Beth overhears him saying that he doesn’t much like the drafts of the novel he’s read. In You Hurt My Feelings, Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer of modest renown whose last book, a memoir about her somewhat troubled childhood, underperformed, and who is working on her first novel with frustrating results.
Thank god, at least, that she and Holofcener found each other, so wonderfully complementary are their styles. The actor, who previously worked with Holofcener in the lovely Enough Said, is so endlessly appealing on the big screen-funny, perceptive, natural-that one can easily envision a whole resume of interesting work spanning the years since Seinfeld.Īnd yet, Louis-Dreyfus has only done a handful of films. Watching Nicole Holofcener’s new film You Hurt My Feelings, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, one begins to wonder why Julia Louis-Dreyfus hasn’t been starring in movies for decades.
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