‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: Hurts So Good
metroweekly.comEnough Said, to spin small-scale moral conflict into sharply observed, well-constructed comedy in You Hurt My Feelings (★★★★☆).In their previous outing, Louis-Dreyfus sparkled onscreen opposite James Gandolfini, playing an L.A.
divorcée who discovers that the divorcé she’s dating happens to be recently divorced from the woman who’s become her new best friend.
What to do, what to do? Hilarity ensues, or in that case, a warmly funny, exceedingly genuine look at seasoned adults struggling to close one chapter and move on to the next.For this comic portrait of urbane adults in crisis, Holofcener swings to the east coast, for the tale of neurotic New Yorker Beth (Louis-Dreyfus), author of a successful memoir, who’s already feeling insecure about publishing her first novel when she overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) telling someone he thinks the new book is “no good.”Don’s unvarnished honesty — which directly contradicts the praise he’d said to Beth’s face — sets off an escalating war of revelations and recriminations.
Beth questions whether she can trust any of Don’s past words of praise and encouragement, and whether or not he even respects her as a writer.He questions why it should matter, but, of course, it does.First of all, the film argues, words matter, and Don’s words matter especially to Beth, whose memoir, I Had to Tell It, details years of her late father’s verbal abuse.And Don’s opinion matters because, as the film suggests with repeated, amusing visits to the creative writing course Beth teaches at the New School — where none of the students have read her work — artists crave validation like anybody else.Audience response is part of an artist’s process, and if their audience is lying to them, what have.
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