No Hard Feelings
Directed by Gene Stupnitsky
Running time: 1hr43 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman in No Hard Feelings
There was a time, not even that long ago, when we’d have been less likely to consider No Hard Feelings a Film of the Week — in part because films like it came out, well, every week or so. The second feature from writer-director Gene Stupnitsky, who had a surprise hit four years ago with the raucous teen movie Good Boys, is a cheerfully broad, character-centred summer comedy for (nominal) grownups, fuelled largely by star quality and chemistry: the kind of thing that film studios, in a market hogged by superheroes and identikit franchises, have largely consigned to TV.
That is not a recommendation in and of itself, but No Hard Feelings has more than just a multiplex throwback slot going for it. For the star driving this vehicle is a wonderful Jennifer Lawrence, returning to the romcom genre that, around the time she won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, we assumed she’d reign over for years, right as Hollywood lost interest in that very niche. And here, loose and goofy and bringing a welcome handful of dirtbag grit to an America’s Sweetheart archetype, she proves it’s very much their loss. No Hard Feelings isn’t perfect — occasionally it feels hamstrung by its own wackiest contrivances — but it’s good enough, and funny enough, to demonstrate why stars like Lawrence should still have films built around them, and not just be zipped into whichever spandex suit is currently going spare.
Happily, she’s not working alone: in endearingly gawky up-and-comer Andrew Barth Feldman, Lawrence has an improbably spry comic doubles partner. The improbability is the point, even the premise. He’s Percy, a shy, withdrawn 19-year-old virgin whose wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) are concerned he’ll flounder socially at college; Lawrence is Maddie, a hard-up 32-year-old slacker cycling between casual jobs and casual flings. They’re paired up via a doozy of a screenwriter’s intervention: Percy’s otherwise prim-and-proper parents offer Maddie a handsome reward to date and shag their son, thus preparing him for adulthood. Sure? I guess? No Hard Feelings never quite makes sense of this, but if you can clear that high-concept hurdle, you’re rewarded with the rich farcical potential of this odd couple very oddly coupling.
The marketing has billed No Hard Feelings as a sex comedy, which it sort of is — though bar one memorably choreographed nude fight scene on the beach, there’s little here that would have raised eyebrows in the age of American Pie. Instead, its pleasures are surprisingly tender: occasionally, it feels like the raunchier trappings of Stupnitsky and John Phillips’ script are a sheepish cover for a sweet, even bittersweet, character study of two rather lonely people learning what they want out of life through one plainly unworkable relationship.
You could make a quiet, gentle indie version of that story, and the Lawrence who recently gave a fine performance in the quiet, gentle indie Causeway could even have starred in it. But I appreciate the clash of tones and textures in No Hard Feelings, its smuggling of human sadness into sunny popcorn fodder, and the way it allows its megawatt star to play hot and cold, big and small, high and low, smart and dumb. And the way it allows us, title notwithstanding, to feel something. Check your brain at the door, people always says about big summer movies, and that’s fine. But you don’t have to check your heart in too.
NO HARD FEELINGS (2023) Written by Gene Stupnitsky, John Phillips | Shot by Eigil Bryld | Edited by Brent White
In cinemas now