I'm not putting potato salad in tin foil
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2023
#35 : You Hurt My Feelings
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies lead grownup marital-pain comedy whose bittersweet punchlines stress the bitter component.
I've never heard of this but it sounds like a proper film, which feels like it's been a bit of a rarity so far this year, so I'm looking forward to it. And it's only 91 minutes as well - yay!
A married couple, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author and creative writing teacher and Ben (Tobias Menzies), a therapist, both have jobs which gives them plenty of opportunities to come across amusing characters. The marriage appears to be happy - both characters have their quirks, but they seem to rub along nicely. But then Beth hears Ben telling his brother Mark (Arian Moayed) who's married to Beth's sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins) what he really thinks about Beth's latest book. Uh-oh.
As you might guess, there's a certain amount of fallout from this to be worked through - and that's what most of the film involves, with constant callbacks to various therapy sessions, creative writing lessons and other random scenarios, including choosing lights and buying socks. It also has a nice ending in which people manage to learn from their experiences - whilst also staying exactly the same.
It's rarely laugh-out-loud funny but it's got a subtle level of humour and maintains a nice consistent quality level throughout. But it also has a nice level of realism in terms of familial balancing of truth and encouragement and it's interesting how people have their views challenged and how they react to that. It also has some nice running gags throughout the film - there's also a surprising amount of adjective-based humour, which suggests there really were some clever writers involved in this.
Julia and Tobias are both great in this and make a very relatable couple. I knew I knew Tobias from somewhere but had to check Wikipedia to remind me that he was the love interest in This Way Up - but more people probably know him from The Crown. I knew Julia from Seinfeld and Veep, but she's been in a surprising number of episodes of things - 57 SNLs, 33 Day By Days, 177 Seinfelds, 19 Watching Elles, 88 The New Adventures Of Old Christine and 65 Veeps! And she's even found time to pop up in a couple of Marvel movies as well.
Arian (Stewy in Succession) and Michaela (LOADS of things, none of which I've seen) are also both very good - they bounce nicely off each other and the main couple. Also worthy of particular mention is Owen Teague (probably best known from It) who plays Eliot, Beth and Ben's son - it would be easy to make the role quite whiny, but he engenders a great deal of sympathy (and gives us a nice alternative viewpoint).
Also of note is the quality of the people taking smaller roles - you might not recognise their names, but you might well know the faces of David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, Zach Cherry, Sarah Steele and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. It's a high calibre cast so either someone knows a lot of people or they were attracted by the quality of the script (or both!). It's also well shot - New York is looking very fine in this, but also surprisingly liveable.
This is exactly the sort of film I was hoping to find in the middle to lower reaches of The Guardian's chart - something I'd not heard of that's not necessarily a "great film" but is well written, acted and shot. This ticks all those boxes and so praise must go to Nicole Holofcener who wrote, directed and produced it. I thought it was an absolute pleasure to watch and strongly recommend it if you're looking for a "grown-up" film to watch. And, for a change, it's currently available to stream on a channel that you might actually have access to - Amazon Prime. Or you can rent it in all the usual other locations.
Comments
Post a Comment