IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 15th June
Seen: 4th November
One thing that’s particularly hard to talk about is films with low stakes. Films where people are just trying to get by in a small everyday situation where there isn’t much being risked are often the kinds of films that are perfectly fine enough but don’t have much that you can really sink your teeth into in order to talk about. Maybe a smarter reviewer would have set up something so that films like this could be bunched together in a single post instead of trying to turn “It’s fine” into a thousand-word review… this isn’t a site run by a smarter reviewer, this site is run by a big dumb dummy who thought it would be a good idea to do a lengthy individual review on every film that is seen in a given year so now I will attempt to find ways to talk about You Hurt My Feelings for more than a few paragraphs, which is going to be a challenge but one worth trying.
You Hurt My Feelings is a film about your standard New York couple. Don (Tobias Menzies) is a therapist who is trying his best to help his clients but they just all seem to be impossible to help on some level. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a writer who is trying to write the follow-up to her memoir. They have what could be considered a pretty average relationship, their marriage has gone well enough that it feels like things will be fine forever until Beth overhears Don talking about her new book and how much he doesn’t like it, something that’s news to Beth who has basically only been able to work on the book because Don has said he liked the drafts. This opens up a tiny tear in their marriage that begins a long conversation about the idea of little white lies that they’ve told to keep their relationship intact, something that might (but won’t) blow up in their face.
You Hurt My Feelings is almost exactly what you think when you hear that it’s a slice-of-life dramedy about New Yorkers… in that there’s nothing much going on, everyone talks rapidly and bagels are brought up more often than they need to be. It’s not shooting for something extreme, this isn’t a heavy intense drama or a laugh-out-loud comedy but just a kind of witty dramedy with the lowest stakes possible. No one is really at risk of anything here, the ‘broken trust’ is just two fully grown adults discovering that sometimes you say you like something in order to keep your partner happy.
You Hurt My Feelings spends an insanely long amount of time exploring that idea, how people will pretend to like things that their partner does in order to avoid hurting their feelings and how this can end up just creating bigger problems in the long run. It’s certainly an interesting idea that this film digs into with a fair amount of tact, it never overplays the problem by acting like it’s the end of the world but instead looks at it rationally. These little white lies still end up hurting on some level, they create expectations that people can’t live up to (a particular problem the son character brings up a lot) and make it so people doubt themselves when they don’t see what they’re being told. It’s all the kind of stuff that a lot of domestic dramas don’t really touch on… probably because it might be realistic but it’s not dramatic or interesting.
By picking such a small thing to be what gets between the two main characters, You Hurt My Feelings feels like it might be setting up something interesting. Could this tiny thing blow up into something huge? Reveal that the lies have grown to such a level where nothing is real anymore? Maybe Beth isn’t actually a good writer after all and Don’s constant approval despite his own beliefs has led to her being humiliated in front of the world? No, none of that, it’s just a couple of trivial little issues that can be sorted out in half a discussion where the characters just decide to be a little more open with each other. There’s a reason why a lot of relationship dramas don’t touch on these topics but You Hurt My Feelings goes in on the minutiae of these tiny relationship issues and it’s certainly an interesting take in theory. In practice, it just doesn’t have much to maintain interest.
It does help a little that You Hurt My Feelings has a ton of good performers, the film in general basically revolves around Julia Louis Dreyfus and it does so for good reason (she’s incredible and should be in more movies) but the supporting parts are all well done and any scene that brings in David Cross is going to be worth watching purely for his energy alone. The cast makes the most out of the material that they’ve got, selling the jokes that they’ve been given well enough to get a little chuckle every now and then but it’s all so low energy that they can’t do much, they have to maintain the tone that’s been asked of them and within that boundary, they do a fine job but it’s not going to be anything worth showing off.
At the end of the day, You Hurt My Feelings is just not trying to be anything more than fine. It’s not offensive or badly made, it’s honestly hard to say that anything about it is particularly bad because in order to be bad you have to have ambition, this just doesn’t have that ambition. It’s certainly an interesting idea to tell a story about something so mundane, can’t fault them for trying to see what would happen if they did this but in the end, it just isn’t funny or dramatic enough to be memorable. This film is unable to hurt anyone’s feelings, it would have to try in order to do that.
Movie Meister Reviews 