Jennifer Lawrence is a fantastic comic actor. So it’s too bad that No Hard Feelings trades in the raunchy laughs for feel-good sentimental dramedy.
Jennifer Lawrence as Maggie in No Hard Feelings. (Netflix)
Jennifer Lawrence is a terrific comic actor. Look no further than American Hustle in which she was so fantastic I expected to see her cast in one rowdy comedy after another. But that was ten years ago now, and it hasn’t happened. Not even Lawrence’s many witty interviews have led to the all-out comic roles she was clearly born to play.
So I went to see No Hard Feelings to finally see Lawrence do a straight-up comedy. Film and TV writer-director Gene Stupnitsky (Jury Duty, Bad Teacher, The Office) wrote the lead role in No Hard Feelings with Lawrence in mind, so he gets points for that, at least. Because she’s great, as expected, though the movie is not.
Like so many films these days, it goes off the rails badly after a promising start. In hard times like these, it seems especially awful that almost nobody can do a decent comedy anymore. Hard to believe that Hollywood once had such a great comedy tradition, with slapstick geniuses led by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin dominating the silent film era and the incredible triad of directors — Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder — churning out brilliant films for thirty-some years in the studio era.
You’d never know it now. Seems like almost every comedy writer-director now suffers from Woody Allen syndrome and desperately wants to make serious, poignant, socially significant films that sacrifices the laughs, as if a film comedy that’s funny as hell can’t also be serious and significant in its ideas.
Anyway, No Hard Feelings is being marketed as a kind of throwback to the raunchy summer comedies of yore, yore being about a generation ago when American Pie (1999), Road Trip (2000), Wet Hot American Summer (2001), Super Troopers (2001), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), and Pineapple Express (2008) were part of a big popular wave of movies reviving the raunchy sex comedies of a generation before that, like Porky’s (1981), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Losin’ It (1982), Risky Business (1983), and Weird Science (1985). Overall, few of them set a high cinematic standard, but at least they generally tried to be funny throughout.
But the pervasively prim sexual anxiety of our times means that there’s a lot of predictable hand-wringing over the horrors of raunch, leading to headlines like Slate’s “Is Jennifer Lawrence’s New Rom-com with a High Schooler As Creepy As It Seems?”
Not to worry, everyone! Civilization is saved! Turns out the movie deals extensively with how wrong it is for a thirty-two-year-old woman to attempt to seduce a nineteen-year-old man. Lawrence’s character is regarded as a perverted old crone any number of times — you’d think she was Mrs Methuselah literally robbing the cradle. In one party scene, teenagers make faces registering their revulsion as she passes by, though of course she looks hotter than blazes.
Still from No Hard Feelings (Netflix)
Note to the world: better pull Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — and probably a lot of other worthy films — from circulation, now that any age-gap between sexual partners is regarded as so taboo you should go blind looking at it.
At least No Hard Feelings has an admirably class-conscious premise. It’s about a woman named Maddie (Lawrence) in desperate financial straits, whose car gets repossessed in the opening scene, meaning she won’t be able to work her second job as an Uber driver. That in turn means she won’t be able to pay the IRS the back taxes she owes on her late mother’s house in the Long Island resort area of Montauk, which has gentrified at such a terrifying rate that she’s one of the last owners of a reasonably sized middle-class property amid the mansions.
Threatened with losing her house and having to roller skate miles to her main job as a bartender serving the rich tourists she despises, she resorts to desperate measures. She answers a strange Craigslist ad, placed by wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) seeking a twenty-something women willing to date their shy, sheltered, nerdy teenage son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). He’s barely willing to leave his room, yet he’s scheduled to go off to Princeton University in the fall.
At the job interview in their expensive geometric monstrosity of a home, the parents make it clear that they actually want Maddie to bring virginal Percy out of his shell by having sex with him. The directive is to “date his brains out.” Maddie, whose pragmatic approach to sex involves casual hookups with a variety of locals, takes the idea in stride. It’s romantic commitment that makes her squeamish. She routinely ghosts guys she’s been involved with, including the tow truck driver who takes a glum, vengeful satisfaction in repossessing her car (Ebon Moss-Bachrach of The Bear).
Willing to do almost anything for the used Buick Regal Percy’s parents are dangling before her, Maddie goes after Percy aggressively, but soon discovers that this romantic, sensitive, anxious shut-in “may actually be unfuckable.” His one activity is volunteering at a local dog rescue, and when Maddie shows up in a tight minidress and spike heels, pretending not at all persuasively to want to adopt a dog while coming on to him with scary determination, he rejects her application, telling her, “You’re the type of person we’d usually be taking a dog from.”
She manages to maneuver him into her vehicle — a serial-killer-looking van borrowed from her friends — and is still so strident in her approach, Percy becomes convinced she’s abducting him with possible rape and torture in mind. As soon as she makes a move toward him, he maces her in the face.
Despite this unpromising start, Maddie persuades Percy to go out with her, figuring a few dates will do it. The funniest scene in the film involves a skinny-dipping interlude at the end of their first date that goes violently wrong. Lawrence is doing a lot of press about her scene of full-frontal nudity:
Everyone in my life and my team is doing the right thing and going, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” Lawrence said while promoting the film alongside Feldman. “I didn’t even have a second thought. It was hilarious to me.”
When three smarmy teenagers mock the skinny-dipping Maddie and Percy from the shore and attempt to make off with their clothes, Maddie — still up to her chin in the surf — warns them they’d better not try it. Then she comes storming out of the ocean, striding in formidable Terminator-like fashion and lays into them fearlessly, punching, shoving, kicking. Returned punches only make her come back with increased ferocity, and something about a naked woman winning a one-against-three fight is a hilarious thrill.
But that’s the high point. From there on, the movie gets more and more solemn and talky and full of lesson-learning. Maddie’s inability to commit and class-warrior rage comes from her painful childhood as the unacknowledged daughter of a rich man who deserted his girlfriend, buying Maddie’s mother the house as a final kiss-off. Maddie and Percy bond over their traumas — he was bullied in school and his parents are so overprotective they’ve stifled his growth. She’s a case of emotional arrested development. Together they try to restage the prom experience they both missed in high school, and it all gets very sticky and sensitive and awwww-inspiring.
The writing gets slacker as the laughs dry up. Maddie and Percy become more and more supportive friends and work out their differences, forgetting about the sex altogether. It’s one of those dreaded “sensitive coming-of-age films” by the end.
As the tempo slows, you have time to wonder about things in an idle way. There’s Broderick, for example, once quite a cute comedy star himself in such films as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and The Freshman (1990), now looking paunchy and puckish as Percy’s father. He always seems about to say or do something funny, but he’s never given any material to work with. Why did Broderick, who’s also had a successful stage career (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Producers), take on such an inert role? He can’t possibly need the money — he’s married to Sarah Jessica Parker. Is the director a friend of his?
And the ugly financial realities that underlie the comedy make less sense as the movie winds its way to the end. For example, it’s posited that Maddie will fulfill her youthful dream and move to California once she leaves less and less unaffordable Montauk, one of the busiest resort locations in the Hamptons. But nobody moves to California to find an affordable life that’s also full of promise! But on the other hand, where can the film name as Maddie’s hope-filled destination? What place in America stands for “California” now?
No Hard Feelings definitely isn’t prepared to get that serious or significant, so “California” it is.