You Hurt My Feelings

Grade: B

NBC’s Seinfeld sitcom was often described as “a show about nothing.” One of creator Larry David’s notes for the show was “No hugging. No learning.” And by all appearances, they stuck to that. It wasn’t exactly Full House. As a casual, sporadic viewer, it would often feel like they just let the cameras roll and allowed these gifted comedic actors to yak about anything – sometimes using many words to say not that much. But it had a certain charm.

You Hurt My Feelings has a similar vibe, so it’s appropriate that it stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The material fits her like a glove, and this is one of her best performances. I bet she had fun filming You People, but that movie had characters with absolutely no depth or texture. The people in You Hurt My Feelings are, for the most part, real and grounded. I would rather have dialogue that meanders and doesn’t always amount to anything, than a steamrolled, streamlined beaten-into-submission screenplay.

So many movies focus on only one conflict. It’s all we hear about, and there’s apparently nothing else happening. You Hurt My Feelings is smart enough to realize that in life, there are always multiple things on the table. The main one – which gives the movie its title – is when Louis-Dreyfus’s novelist character overhears a conversation between her husband and brother-in-law. He doesn’t like her book. He was biting his tongue to be supportive of her aspiring career.

But there’s more going on. The husband (Tobias Menzies, from The Crown) is a therapist who, lately, has been struggling. He mixes up his clients’ stories, and has more than one person questioning their future with him. There’s an amusing throughline with a couple he’s counseling (David Cross and Amber Tamblyn). After two years of seeing him and bickering through the sessions, they finally agree on and even bond over one thing: he’s not an effective therapist, and they want out of the professional relationship.

This is a unique, quirky movie. I can best compare it to Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Your Friends and Neighbors. You need to be in a weird specific mindset to appreciate it and take it in. It is low-key and rife with awkward moments, sometimes to a fault. From time to time, it borders on annoying without actually crossing that line. But there is something creative, organic, and endearing about it. And here, there is hugging and learning.

Grade: B