You Hurt My Feelings (Nicole Holofcener, 2023).
At a Friday-night showing of Nicole Holofcener’s latest film You Hurt My Feelings (2023), I noticed several people who had come with their moms. Holofcener makes great films to watch with your mom, if her definition of a great film is something that will make her laugh but won't treat her like an idiot. Holofcener’s stories are smart, funny and heartwarming, a little bit sad in the right places, sophisticated but palatable. Invariably, a great actress plays the lead—Catherine Keener, for the most part, though Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars both in Enough Said (2013) and You Hurt My Feelings.
In the film, Beth (Louis-Dreyfus), a writer, overhears Don (Tobias Menzies) telling her brother-in-law that he doesn't like her latest novel. It hurts her feelings. She dry retches on the sidewalk, sobs to her sister, and swears she will never look at her husband the same way again. Don, a therapist who had been battling feelings of insufficiency in his own practice (more than once he overhears a client calling him a "moron" under his breath), had told Beth that he loved her novel. Beth is shocked at her husband's ability to lie so blatantly, even when the lie is told in the spirit of sparing her exactly the reaction she had to the truth. Viewed one way, this is a modest conflict, but for Beth and Don, it's a significant betrayal; a crack in the strong foundation of their relationship. This is enough to tell the story, which is funny, entertaining, and an airtight 92 minutes: a classic Holofcenerian piece.
With this film, as with the rest of her oeuvre, Holofcener scratches a particular itch for the mid-range dramatic comedy: something that resembles a romantic comedy, but avoids falling into the genre trap. Her work stands alongside a niche of independent films from the nineties and into the early aughts that concern themselves with the mundane but charged stakes of a regular life. Sometimes, crazy things happen, but the characters unceremoniously pass these lessons by. No one wants to live through a teachable moment.
The critical reception of You Hurt My Feelings positioned it as a rare representative of an abandoned genre. In The Atlantic, David Sims pointed out that "comedy-dramas have become embarrassingly scarce in Hollywood these days"; in a less enthusiastic review for Vulture, Alison Willmore conceded that "the kind of sharp, female-centered comedy [Holofcener] specializes in has been shoved from the big screen"; in Slate, Dana Stevens called Holofcener's an "indispensable voice," defending the film against The New Yorker's Anthony Lane's inexplicable notion that the film's premise wasn't sufficiently entertaining.
You Hurt My Feelings makes a strong case for the idea that "entertainment” doesn't have to stand in opposition to art that reveals a deeper despair about navigating the world—an instinct to dry retch on the sidewalk because of a forgivable slight. There was also something sweet about watching You Hurt My Feelings in the theater rather than streaming it at home, and I got a tingly feeling when I saw that it was playing at various multiplexes, sandwiched between superhero spandex. These kinds of films are essential to a cinematic landscape that has something for everyone, not just for cinephiles and not just for superhero fans. Holofcener has been making them for more than twenty years.
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Walking and Talking (Nicole Holofcener, 1996).
The nineties cluster of everyday dramedies includes Holofcener's first film, Walking and Talking (1996), alongside other debuts: Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers, Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming (1995), and Edward Burns's The Brothers McMullen (1995). Though they are small both in scale and scope, they transcend their modest goals through a commitment to emotional realism. In this earnestness, they’re indebted to commercially successful artists like James L. Brooks and Cameron Crowe, whose films inflate mundane conflicts to the point of over-the-top theatricality. Consider Holly Hunter's Jane Craig taking five minutes out of her day to sob; John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up a boombox in the rain; the earnestness of the "you had me at hello" exchange towards the end of Jerry Maguire (1996).
The neat three-act structure preferred by Jerry Maguire and other classic rom-coms like Notting Hill (1999) and Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) is satisfying insofar as the conflicts that arise between lovers can be faced, overcome, and resolved by the time the credits roll. If they have often provided templates of idealization and escapism, it's because we understand that life is much messier: that perhaps the differences between a bookseller and a famous actress might finally prove to be too demanding, or that getting the right guy back after insisting on the wrong one isn't always so easy. Holofcener and her contemporaries' subversion was a subtle one: by taking the light-heartedness and humor of these narratives and bringing them closer to the irresolute confusion of everyday life, they created characters that could conceivably be part of the viewer's world.
In the films of Holofcener’s generation, operatic moments fail, even if they might have worked to great effect in a Crowe or Brooks film; the world is unwilling to absolve the characters of their limitations, keeping them mired in their sticky situations. The critic Devika Girish has written that films of the French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve "tend not to end—they simply stop, like a train at a station, letting passengers off"; we arrive at a certain point and leave at another, knowing that their life is much larger than the frame. Though Hansen-Løve structures her films differently than the everyday dramas discussed here, they do share this lingering sense of capaciousness.
Holofcener grew up in a creative household; her stepfather was the producer and agent Charles Joffe, who produced many of Woody Allen's films in the seventies, including Annie Hall (1977). That film, whatever the controversy surrounding the maker, was a precursor to the kind of small-scale, funny-clever-sad, romantic dramas that Holofcener would make in her career, and to other several romantic comedies that followed it. Like the comically difficult characters that populate Allen's work, part of what makes Holofcener's characters' problems irresoluble is that they are impossibly rooted in their own personalities. This inevitability of spirit is an emotional elephant in the room, occasionally knocking everything out of place. In Walking and Talking, Amelia's (Catherine Keener) best friend Laura (Anne Heche) is getting married, which is happy news, though also an affront to their friendship. At a formative, late-twenties life intersection, the two friends seem to be going in opposite directions. The story operates within the understanding that Amelia knows she is being unreasonable for resenting the fact that her best friend got engaged, though she can't help the way this resentment colors their new dynamic (in this, it's a successor to Claudia Weill's Girlfriends [1977]; both films work as precursors to the obstacles that trip up Greta Gerwig's Frances in Noah Baumbach's 2012 Frances Ha). In this context, neither woman is antagonistic, and neither is in the right: the film thrives because of how it meets them each at their own level, and refuses to find them a solution.
In fact, at the heart of Walking and Talking, as in her later Friends with Money (2006)—centering on a group of friends in various stages of their marriages, careers, and emotional entanglements—is generosity. In these films, loving others comes with a willingness to be compassionate toward stubbornness. Even then, the barriers thrown up in the aftermath of conflict stay there, and these characters have to settle with almost never getting what they want. Each option is impossible: they won't stop being friends, because they love each other; Laura is not going to dissolve her engagement to assuage her sensitive friend; Amelia can't ignore her feelings. There is nothing to do, except be a little funny, apologize, and move on, with the knowledge lurking, somewhere in the back of their minds, that this same point of contention might pop up again, at a later date, under different circumstances.
This is finally where Holofcener's early films distinguish themselves most glaringly from a classic Hollywood rom-com structure: they are more artful in their determination to disappoint any expectation of a neat, definite ending. The heroines of these stories are not particularly anti, but theirs is a journey antithetical to the hero's in that they refuse transformation. They flounder repeatedly in the face of difficulty, and in this respect they are unexpectedly optimistic: there is something very life-affirming about making insolubility the endpoint. Life goes on.
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Please Give (Nicole Holofcener, 2010).
If the tension between Holofcener’s characters is impossibly internal, it is also cruel, and often mean-spirited. It’s apt that her latest film is entitled You Hurt My Feelings: her oeuvre is primarily made up of people, by turns hurt and hurting, who get overwhelmed by an insult or slight. In the most memorable scene from her sophomore feature, Lovely & Amazing (2001), Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) asks Kevin (Dermot Mulroney), who she just slept with for the first time, to tell her “everything that’s wrong with [her].” Naked, she stands at the foot of the bed, her arms hanging limply by her side. Kevin is reluctant at first, naming all of her perfections before turning them against themselves. Elizabeth has a “nice flat stomach” but is “definitely on the skinnier side, a little bit boney.” Her breasts are “nice from the front” but “droopy from the sides.” After he assesses her face—“sweet smile” but “one eye is bigger than the other”—Elizabeth asks him about her arms. He doesn’t see anything wrong with them at first, but when she jiggles them, he agrees to their flabbiness. After being reassured that she’s not upset, Kevin admits that the exercise was “kind of liberating.” Elizabeth asked for this, it’s true. What’s hurtful is not necessarily what Kevin said, but his admission of relief at playing along. His initial refusal of the game is exposed, starkly, as coyness.
Lovely & Amazing puts its characters through more dramatic extremes than Walking and Talking. Elizabeth, a struggling actress, and her sister Michelle (Keener), an artist whose career and marriage are falling apart, are meaner, more entitled to their resentments, and Holofcener cleverly puts them in a world that won’t bend to their will. Confronted with any kind of provocation, Michelle’s immediate reaction is to tell the insulting party to “just fuck off,” though as her husband Bill (Clark Gregg) reminds her, things are hardly that simple (it's by following this flawed logic that Michelle begins an affair with a seventeen-year-old boy, played by Jake Gyllenhaal). If in Walking and Talking and Friends with Money, the main characters' resoluteness is sincere almost to the point of innocence, in Lovely & Amazing and her later Please Give (2010), it's marked by bitterness and anger. Spitefully—if realistically—these women despair at the thought that things just won't go the way they want them to. Michelle's "fuck off" has all the sting of a child sticking their tongue out.
Entering the 2010s, Holofcener's films started to follow more traditional narrative structures, with higher stakes and bigger, graver consequences; in part, I think, because of the emergence of anger as an operating emotion in her stories—anger can, and often does, work as a catalyst for regrettable behavior. These films resemble Cameron Crowe's and Jason Reitman's hit dramedies more than the scrappy, character-driven stories of the nineties indie boom; they have a glossier sheen. Please Give, also starring Catherine Keener, has a bite that may also be a product of the symbiotic collaboration between the director and the actress: Holofcener's protagonists are molded to Keener's winning, edgy sensibility. Keener is always beautiful, and mostly put together, but there is a brittleness to her poise that makes her perfect for the kind of role in which emotion is at a perpetual simmer, on the edge of boiling.
In Please Give, Keener plays Kate, a furniture re-seller with a heavy conscience. With her husband Alex (Oliver Platt), she visits the houses of the recently deceased to buy pieces from their children. They have also bought the apartment next door to theirs, which is occupied by a very old lady, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), cared for by her grandchildren Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet). It's awkward because the thing keeping Kate and Alex from breaking the walls between the apartments is Andra's resilient health, which is also something of a problem for Rebecca and Mary. The first puts up with her grandmother's insults and snark in a resigned, loving way, but Mary is waiting, with a ruthless eagerness, for Andra to die.
Please Give pushes the concept of compassion to a breaking point. Everything makes Kate feel bad: the fact that the people whose furniture she buys are dead; that their kids don't always know how much vintage furniture can go for, and therefore can easily be taken advantage of; the fact that there are homeless people on her street, and that Andra is so old, and that Rebecca doesn't always give her a friendly smile. Kate bursts into tears watching kids with Down Syndrome playing basketball. Rebecca, quiet, reserved and tireless in her care for her grandmother, effortlessly embodies everything Kate tries hard to be.
As Holofcener's films become glossier, so do her characters. The aimlessness of Olivia (Jennifer Aniston's character in Friends with Money), Michelle, and Amelia is replaced by an opposing emptiness: having achieved professional success and financial stability, women like Kate still don't quite know what to do with themselves. A particularly white-liberal class guilt swoops in to agonize the same parts of her characters that were once suffering over inadequate love and ambition. Holofcener is self-conscious in her depiction of this sticky, uncomfortable dynamic. Speaking with Ariel Levy for the 2018 New Yorker profile that preceded the premiere of her sixth film, The Land of Steady Habits, in 2018, Holofcener's mother said: "She feels very guilty, that one. She grew up with a lot of feelings of not being worthy or being too lucky." Holofcener herself is relentlessly involved in community work, volunteering for nonprofit organizations and rescuing animals. She told Levy: "I've always liked to volunteer…. It relieves my guilt."
If the defining emotion of her first three films is inadequacy, from Please Give on, it is guilt, hand-in-hand with anger. The scale of Kate's problems remains bite-sized, manageable, unfurling largely in an apartment, a store, the radius of a few New York blocks. But the scope starts to get unwieldy, outgrowing the boundaries of the characters and their interpersonal relationships. How to deal with another person is a despairing enough question as it is; the question of how to deal with an inequitable, unfair society might just be paralyzing. Depicting a variety of awkward, misguided interactions—Kate offers a take-home box of leftovers to a Black man waiting in line for a table at a restaurant after mistaking him for a homeless man—Holofcener has tact. Kate can't recognize the narcissism of her own guilt, but Holofcener can, and, for that matter, so can Keener. Though Kate is Holofcener's most grating character by more than a few miles, Please Give is the only of her films that made me cry. There's nothing quite as heartbreaking as coming face to face with your own limitations.
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Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013).
With these four films under her belt, Holofcener had established herself as a distinct voice in independent film, a woman whose modest sensibilities belied ambitious character development. Against this background, 2013's Enough Said, which the New Yorker’s Levy called Holofcener's "most conventional film," feels like something of a departure. Anchored in her particular sense of humor and the same mundane, low-stakes but high intensity conflict that marked her earlier work, it tackles a much more traditional narrative arc, borrowing from the classic Hollywood romantic comedy structure. Starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva and James Gandolfini in his last role as Albert, it approximates Nancy Meyers's Something's Gotta Give and Nora Ephron's Heartburn in tone and style, but surpasses both of them with the Holofcenerian mark: a more layered and less obvious approach to conflict.
Eva, a masseuse in Los Angeles, meets a nice guy, Albert, at a party. Her problem is that Albert's ex-wife, Marianne (Keener), is a client who doesn't mince words in her litany of complaints about Albert, his mannerisms, and his weight. Eva keeps her relationship with Marianne secret from Albert and vice-versa, and silently but compulsively compares what she learns with what she experiences in her daily life. It's a sitcom kind of problem, simple in its setup. Eva could disclose her relationship to either party in an effort to avoid further complication, or she could simply disregard Marianne's complaints in the face of the loving, caring man she knows Albert to be. This simplicity is one of the film's great assets: it's easy to imagine being paralyzed with indecisiveness and fear because the solution is so crystal clear. In the case of Amelia and Michelle, lack of foresight and imaginative problem-solving leads to a delusional kind of confidence, a throw-in-the-towel approach to difficulty that by turns alleviates suffering and makes matters much worse. Eva, for her part, knows what she needs to do, and what she needs to do is impossible. After her double-deception is discovered, Eva pleads with Albert that she didn't know what to do. With devastating composure, Albert retorts: "You did know what to do. You just didn't do it." At the end of the film, we get the impression that Eva and Albert will make up, a neat conclusion that Holofcener's previous work had evaded.
As Holofcener’s work progresses toward more traditional narrative structures, the knotty conflicts at their core start to slacken and untangle, though they are still largely internalized; which means that, in order for these problems to surface, they need to be brought up, translated and expressed by the people suffering them, whether they hope to resolve the issues or just relieve themselves of the weight of carrying them. If this approach is less sophisticated than her earlier work, it's also heartwarming in a more direct way: still laser-focused on the kind of unremarkable problem that can gnaw, twist and hurt. The exception may be 2018's The Land of Steady Habits, the only adapted screenplay Holofcener has directed, which is a much more melodramatic movie than Holofcener's usual beat; the centrality of guilt to the story is over-emphasized through behaviors that feel too literal.
With You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener pulls back and relaxes, returning to the kind of low-stakes conflict that advanced the would-be plots of her earlier work. The premise is at once auspicious and understated; it's the kind of crisis that doesn't change the course of a life, but is momentous enough to change the paradigm of a relationship. They make amends two-thirds of the way into the story, when Beth's anger has dissipated enough for her to recognize that Don would rather be a supporter than a critic. They air out every white lie they have been telling each other for years; by the end of the film, the impulse to pretend to like a gift to be polite registers like an inside joke for the couple.
Here, Holofcener's approach to the central conflict is less ambiguous than in her earlier work, when the problems were never quite as straightforward. But she still manages to reflect the dramatic patter of real life by committing to the continuity of her characters' lives. Don's lie is the inciting incident, but far from the only incident; their conflict resembles the kind of petty fight that becomes a vivid touchstone of a couple's life, not strong enough to break it but serious enough to never be forgotten. It's exactly the kind of thing that, as time goes by, becomes something to laugh about, as Don and Beth do. By honoring this small blip, Holofcener calls back to her subtle ethos of generosity—the people we love can sometimes be maddening, as Don's withholding of his true opinions over twenty drafts of her manuscript was, but they are still more than their mistakes.
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Speaking with Levy for the New Yorker profile, Holofcener said: "I can't help liking the kinds of movies I like—even though I try," referring to her preference for "sad, small [stories]." In order to be able to make these, as Levy explains, Holofcener has often directed episodes of TV shows and commercials, and also written bigger, more ambitious blockbusters, such as Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and Ridley Scott's The Last Duel (2021), which she wrote with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. These movies, though excellent, are worlds away from the lower-key plots of Holofcener's directorial projects.
In 1995, Ted Hope, then co-president of Good Machine Productions—which produced both Walking and Talking and Lovely & Amazing, among other nineties indie classics like Safe (1995) and The Brothers McMullen—wrote a polemic for Filmmaker Magazine in which he predicted the death of the indie, writing that "fewer and fewer distributors will take a risk on a great film if its marketing potential is not immediately identifiable." If this statement was obvious then, almost thirty years later with the advent of streaming platforms, we’re only starting to grasp the implications. Last year, we saw the release of several critically acclaimed mid-range movies: James Gray's Armageddon Time, Lena Dunham's Sharp Stick, and Charlotte Wells's Aftersun, to name just a few. The difference is that none of these films made more than eight million dollars in box office revenue (by comparison, as of the last week of August, Barbie has already made more than five hundred million). In a Cannes interview from last year, James Gray explained this challenging dynamic clearly and exasperatedly: "When you make movies that only make a ton of money, and they're only one kind of movie, you begin to get a large segment of the population out of the habit of going to the movies; and then you begin to eliminate the importance of movies culturally." Indeed, for Michael Schuman's behemoth of a New Yorker article "How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood," multiple executives spoke to how the dominance of I.P. "has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie."
The case is not only Gray’s, or mine; there's an obvious thirst for films that fall outside the remit of mega-franchises. When I asked a group of high-school-aged creative writing students what movies they liked, they rattled off aughts rom-coms (27 Dresses, 10 Things I Hate About You, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) as well as movies like Whiplash and even Lady Bird. I think about watching Enough Said with my mom on a random slow afternoon, our cheeks sore from laughing, feeling that almost imperceptible change that happens when you hear a really good story; or re-watching Friends with Money over dinner, promising myself only thirty minutes and giving in to the whole thing. The mid-range, as Gray puts it, maintains "broad-based interest”; it breeds curiosity and open-mindedness in the audience. In this context, Nicole Holofcener's films are vital.