You Hurt My Feel­ings review – slight but charm­ing mar­i­tal comedy

Writ­ing can be a lone­ly pur­suit, and authors must often rely on those clos­est to them for sup­port and feed­back as they attempt to nav­i­gate the process of con­struct­ing a sto­ry. So it goes for Beth (Julia Louie-Drey­fus), a nov­el­ist who has just fin­ished her sec­ond book – a fol­low-up to her rea­son­ably suc­cess­ful mem­oir. She has what she believes to be a good mar­riage ther­a­pist hus­band Don (Tobias Men­zies), until she over­hears him crit­i­cis­ing her new nov­el to her broth­er-in-law Mark (Ari­an Moayed). Dev­as­tat­ed by what she per­ceives as an emo­tion­al betray­al, Beth turns to her sis­ter Sarah (Michaela Watkins) for advice about how she should proceed.

Holofcener has built a career out of craft­ing inti­mate rela­tion­ship stud­ies (cen­tered, more or less, on the white mid­dle class) and it’s worth acknowl­edg­ing as much if only to indi­cate that it’s remark­able she man­ages to cre­ate such rich char­ac­ters with­in the frame­work. Per­haps it’s a case of ​‘write what you know’ being gen­uine­ly good advice, but at any rate, her wry script is pop­u­lat­ed with peo­ple who feel flawed but lived-in and famil­iar. Louie-Drey­fus and Men­zies have a delight­ful report, to the extent that when their son Elliott (Owen Teague) accus­es them of being code­pen­dent, it’s easy to under­stand where he’s com­ing from.

Elliott also tells his moth­er that she should have been less sup­port­ive of him when he was younger, as her unwa­ver­ing pos­i­tiv­i­ty gave him an inflat­ed sense of his own tal­ent. This par­ent­ing dilem­ma harkens back to Beth and Don’s ongo­ing argu­ment about him not lik­ing her work, and the age-old ques­tion of how hon­est we should be with our loved ones when it comes to their insecurities.

It’s a small but per­fect­ly formed com­e­dy of man­ners, with Men­zies par­tic­u­lar­ly great as a ther­a­pist who finds him­self unable to care about the lives of his patients. Although a sub­plot involv­ing Beth’s sis­ter and broth­er-in-law weighs the script down (despite the always charm­ing Ari­an Moayed) it’s a sweet, slight film about the nag­ging wor­ry at the back of every artist’s head: they’re actu­al­ly just a mediocre tal­ent, being polite­ly humoured by their friends and family.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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