You Hurt My Feeling: How She Deals With It

Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:

From acclaimed filmmaker Nicole Holofcener comes a sharply observed comedy about a novelist whose long standing marriage is suddenly upended when she overhears her husband give his honest reaction to her latest book. A film about trust, lies, and the things we say to the people we love most.Content collapsed.

Review:

You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcenter’s new comedy, starring Julia Louis Dreyfuss, is literally about a writer who gets her feelings hurt when she overhears her husband saying to his best friend that he really doesn’t like her new novel, a project that’s she been laboring on for years. From there it expands to show how humans bruise each other mentally and emotionally with the little white lies, the minor dishonesties we say to each to spare their feelings.

The white liar is her husband Don (Tobias Menzies). Beth’s (Dreyfuss) reactions to this truth creates most of the comedy and revelations. Don, a psychiatrist, rightfully suspects that the truth would wound Beth to her core, destroy their relationship trust and maybe even their marriage. Beth has never developed the thick skin to criticism that most other successful writers have. Her first book was a memoir about her abusive (entirely of the verbal kind) childhood. Most writers can separate ego from their work once they realize that all writing need not be an act of self-confession and personal autobiography. I know I filter all my poetry through a poetic persona precisely for that reason. The poet needs to be in and yet apart from the world.

Holofcenter really doesn’t want to focus on the pain, but the healing process. Don and Beth have a bond that is unselfconscious and generously shared. Holofcenter, who also wrote the screenplay, shows that not all the sharing, the moments of ’I love this’ and ‘It’s great’ where sometimes not that, just the little white lies of love accommodation.

Once the confession comes out from Beth, the pain expressed, the hard work of dealing with it begins. In Hurt it’s shown as sleeping on the sofa, ignoring and avoiding Don. When she echos that confusion to Don and it’s over heard by her son (Owen Teague), her psychic and emotional mirror, who reacts in the same insecure way as her , does the pair, the family start to adjudicate the disappointment and come to grips with the truths that arise from this unburdening.

Both are oddly in the constructive honesty business. She’s a creative writing teacher, when she’s not writing. He’s a psychotherapist. There not particularly in love with their jobs, just the fact that it allows them to support themselves and do what they want. The script is tightly constructed to show how this leveling and white lie accommodation is pretty much universal among every body. What needs to yield is their narcissism and personal vanity. The film is an efficient and lean 93 minutes.

Unlike Holofcenter previous films You Hurt My Feelings is a work of discipline and structure and not chaos. Her usual brutish honest narcissist characters are mostly confined to Don’s therapy couch. It’s a situation comedy in the classic sense.