![]() Holofcener nimbly explores the differing limits and context of honesty throughout the film with Don’s patients finding a way to admit his failings as a therapist, Beth’s sister (a note-perfect Michaela Watkins) dealing with both her actor husband’s creative spiral and the whims of her interior decorating clients, and Beth and Don’s son reacting to what he perceives as supportive dishonesty, pretending he was good at things growing up when the opposite was true. Holofcener’s characters have that liberal “Well the world is falling apart so should we really be this distracted by the small stuff?” awareness but it’s trumped by the more realistic emotional gut response of “My feelings are hurt and that sucks.” Beth and Don are grappling with the toll of age, with Don considering cosmetic surgery and Beth worrying that she might have wasted time on something she’s just not good at, but they’re never too old to grow out of the desire to be liked or appreciated or taken seriously, and unvarnished truths sting no matter the age. It’s an ingenious way to light a fuse, a brief candid moment causing the kind of deep cuts that may never fully heal. Beth is crushed (the scene is smartly played for heartbreak over humour) and has to find a way to live with this knowledge, causing an inevitable unravelling. Even after her agent finally confesses that she’s unsure of its commercial viability, Don continues to tell her how talented she is and, having read every draft, how fantastic her book will be.īut one day, the unimaginable happens when Beth overhears Don tell her sister’s partner that he doesn’t rate the book at all and is fatigued by reading draft after draft. Beth is coming off the back of a well-reviewed yet under-read memoir detailing the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her father (she darkly wishes at times he had been worse so it could have sold more copies) and is trying to get her first novel published. Writer-professor Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and therapist Don (Tobias Menzies) are as copacetic as could be, still passionate, still sharing each other’s meals (much to the disgust of their son) and still supporting each other professionally. In You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener takes these gristly questions and uses them to poke holes in an otherwise annoyingly happy, borderline smug, marriage. ![]()
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