You Hurt My Feelings

Nicole Holofcener has a delicate touch. Her pearl-like insight in You Hurt My Feelings—which she wrote and directed—is that the most emotionally intelligent people are often the most childlike. The principals, who occupy a gentrified New York City that swaddles them like a sweater, are: Beth, a memoirist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); her husband Don, a psychologist (Tobias Menzies); her sister Sarah, a decorator (Michaela Watkins); and Sarah’s husband Mark, an actor (Arian Moayed). Feelings are their métier.

The plot hinges on Beth overhearing Don tell Mark, in confidence, that the new book she’s working on isn’t very good. Despite harboring this opinion, which weighs on him, he continues to cheer her on. But this pulls the rug out from under his partner’s self-esteem, and makes Beth question all the feedback she has ever received. There was no solid ground beneath that white lie—at least not enough for Beth to stand on, all on her own.

Holofcener, however, is on solid ground. Her film is a comedy of manners about people for whom manners matter a lot. For the characters in, say, a Seinfeld episode, manners are indictments in citizen’s arrests when people violate social norms. (Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine was an overzealous enforcer.) For Beth’s cohort, however, manners are their love language; they make an otherwise troubled world serene. This observation gives Louis-Dreyfus and Holofcener just enough comic distance from Beth to put her hurt feelings in perspective without ever diminishing them. And this, too, is serene.

I can imagine taking a less favorable view of Beth’s low-key marital bliss: insisting that it is built on privilege or the powder of snowflakes. Perhaps for the bourgeoisie it was always thus. But even within this rather limited purview we have contrasts: Jeannie Berlin as Beth’s prickly mother (Beth’s father was verbally abusive); Amber Tamblyn and David Cross as patients in couples therapy whose love language appears to be hate. Beth and Don’s 20-something son Eliot (Owen Teague) gets a surfeit of affection—and still feels like a third wheel. Why shouldn’t he? His parents, it seems very clear, have won at being middle-aged, and from the peaks and valleys of youth, such a humble plateau might well seem like unattainable real estate.

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