Winner Following this, screenwriter and director Nicole Holofcener will devote an entire film to the irritatingly uncomfortable limits of honesty in relationships. contact, because her work, Walking and Talking at Friends with Money, has always been talked about for his ability to be frank and unflinching about the way we treat each other. How honest should we be with the people we care about if we know our answers will hurt them? Is lying to protect your feelings ultimately a sign of true love or vice versa, allowing someone to develop false ideas about who they are and what they can do? And what happens when they find out how you really feel?
In You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener takes these macabre questions and uses them to puncture a dull, happy marriage, complacent boundaries.Writer-teacher Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and therapist Don (Tobias Menzies) are just the way they are, always passionate, always sharing each other’s meals (which makes their son very uncomfortable) and always supportive. professionally support each other. Beth has just launched a well-edited but little-read memoir detailing the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her father (she wishes it had been worse sometimes for him to have). could sell more copies) and is trying to get her first novel published. Even after her agent for
finally confessed that she was unsure of her commercial viability, Don continued to tell her how talented she was and after reading each copy. draft, how wonderful her book will be.
But one day, the unthinkable happened when Beth overheard Don telling her sister’s associates that he didn’t rate a book at all and was tired of reading manuscript after manuscript. Beth is crushed (the scene is cleverly played out of grief rather than comedy) and must find a way to live with this knowledge, causing an inevitable end.
It’s an ingenious way to light a wick, a brief, candid moment that causes a deep cut that may never fully heal. The Holofcener characters have this liberal saying “Well, the world is falling apart, so are we really distracted by the little things?” conscious, but it is overshadowed by the more realistic emotional response of “My feelings are hurt and it sucks.” Beth and Don grapple with the burden of age, Don considers getting plastic surgery, and Beth worries she’s wasting her time on something she’s not good at, but they’re never too old to do it. . or taken seriously, and unflattering facts will make you
years old.
Holofcener quickly explores the different limits and contexts of honesty throughout the film with Don’s patients seeking to acknowledge their failures as a therapist, sister of Beth (a perfect Michaela Watkins) deals with both the creative whirlpool of her actor husband and the whims of his interior design clients, and Beth and Don’s son reacts to these what he considers to be dishonestly supportive, claiming that he has grown up very well while the opposite is true.As is almost the case with Holofcener’s work (Netflix’s 2018 adaptation of The Land of Steady Habits serves as its only real grumble), this subtly themed drama is very cleverly, giving us little thought while watching , asks us what we will do or how we will react or what we can endure.
It’s fun to spend time with Holofcener’s characters: smart, self-aware, outspoken, and homely, in a way that never seems highly humorous despite situations that may closely resemble those of situations used in sitcoms (a silly sequence here involving a gun is a lonely blip). His writing can be confrontational and harsh but funny and above all brimming with warmth. There is so much detail in the small observations that its characters talk not only about each other and how we act, but also about life and life in New York (crying over shabby cafes, remembering. Dirty restaurant menus and whining about ridiculous furniture prices).
