You Hurt My Feelings - Review Thread

I’m not sure how much she’d welcome the comparison but it sure seems like Nicole Holofcener has taken over for Woody Allen as a maker of small scale movies about the lives of neurotic upper-middle class city dwellers. That seems to be particularly clear when she makes movies set in Allen’s old stomping grounds of New York City like her latest movie You Hurt My Feelings, which looks at what could certainly be dismissed as fairly first world problems experienced by some of that city’s rather privileged inhabitants but still manages to tap into something pretty relatable in its own way. The film looks at a long time married couple played by Julia Louise-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies. Menzies plays a (possibly not very talented) psychologist and Dreyfus plays a moderately successful author who has been working on her follow-up to her memoir while also teaching a university writing seminar. Things start to come into (small scale) crisis when the Dreyfus overhears her husband telling a friend that he actually doesn’t like her new book at all and doesn’t know if he can come clean about this after having claimed to like it in order to be encouraging. This really hurts her and leads to something of a light meditation on the nature of little white lies and what they really mean and what even is honesty in a relationship. So, yeah, it’s a movie about a fairly minor part of the human condition, but a part nonetheless and the movie does manage to wring a surprisingly large amount of material out of what could be said to be a rather slight concept. The film is kind of sneakily perfect in a lot of its casting with some interesting people brought in to play supporting characters and while I can’t say the movie had me rolling on the floor laughing I would say I was fairly amused through most of the film.