Review: No Hard Feelings

Director:  Gene Stupnitsky

Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Matthew Broderick 

Fuck, that’s a good feeling. A broad, playful, brightly lit and breezy comedy with no pre-existing IP, low stakes and a high (or high enough) hit ratio playing in a multiplex screening room with disrespectful teenagers and overzealous air-conditioning. A sticky overpriced drink in a paper cup you fill yourself and the choral laughter of others around you having a good time with something midway between gross-out crude and earnestly heartfelt. Keep your failing superhero movies and their encouragingly poor box office. Gimme some sweet mid-budget kinda-inappropriate romcom vibes every time. I haven’t felt like nostalgic about a mainstream release since Top Gun: Maverick. As Vin Diesel would say, “…the movies”.

Let’s rewind a little. On paper, this sounds awful. Jennifer Lawrence stars as Maddie Barker, a lifelong Montauk resident down on her luck and struggling to keep her old family home since her car got towed. She answers an ad placed by a rich couple (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) who are offering a Buick as a prize to any young woman who will “date” their shy, retiring 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Didn’t Lawrence win an Oscar once?

Yes, she did, and get down off your high horse. Drama has proven pretty easy for comics to cross over to, but the same can rarely be said going the other way. Comedy is hard and it is a riot to watch Lawrence throw herself into Maddie with so much gusto. The truth is, Lawrence has always been pretty funny. No Hard Feelings finally gives her room to showcase, and she’s up for it.

While there’s a definite bent toward the jock-schlock crude sex comedies of both the early ’80s and early ’00s (everything comes back around, baby), there are also – gasp – levels to this thing, and they’re nicely played. Of course Maddie is kinda wounded, gun-shy about exposing her feelings, brashly representative of some fizzling millennial attitudes. Percy, on the other hand, has grown up in a cocoon of privilege and online Gen Z culture, sensitive of causing offence and frankly daunted by the world. Naturally Maddie’s robotic, get-in get-done approach to their supposed romance petrifies him.

In this sense No Hard Feelings reveals itself as a somewhat typical and predictable role-reversal comedy, but the age-gap – squarely addressed throughout the film – is also a flip on the Hollywood norm, and its interesting to watch people squeal in disgust around the peripheries of this film over something so often taken for granted when presented the other way. Granted, No Hard Feelings goes for the predatory, but it’s deliciously knowing about it. Maddie’s initial cougar caricatures are hysterical, but they’re also part of her matrix of defense mechanisms tailored to thwart emotional connection.

Alas, emotional connection is what Percy wants. The middle of the film is a deft cruise through genuinely funny set pieces, all of which develop a more complex bond between the characters. Maddie’s initial onslaught tempers. For all her train wreck responses, she is an adult, and the implications of what she’s pursuing are not lost on her. She becomes protective of Percy who, unfortunately, develops quite a crush.

While the film is quick to side with Maddie’s perspective of the coddled upcoming generation, she also learns from it, and the film acknowledges that the ideas coming through are worth attention. You might say in this respect the film has its cake and eats it. But it also feels honestly representative of micro-generational struggles that go on in the world. The minutiae of positive change.

And there’s also – throughout – a conversation happening here about class tensions, about gentrification in resort towns and the assumption that anyone can be bought and sold. Doesn’t Madde play into this because her immediate surroundings have normalised her assumed position in society?

Let’s not get too heavy. In the main the report is that No Hard Feelings is a blast. Lawrence shows herself to be a natural slapstick performer, Barth Feldman holds his own opposite her, and its a relief to find that not all the movie’s best bits were given up in the trailer. And things only improve once all players start acknowledging that sex is complicated, funny, icky, messy and embarrassing. A particularly lowbrow moment with a finger-trap aside, it pretty much sails through.

There are some minor quibbles. The finale employs some frankly bad digital effects involving Lawrence, fire and a car accident, and there’s another sequence that triggers some uncanny-valley vibes that I won’t elaborate on here. But, considering the genre, such fumbling is acceptable. There’s also a mild sense of missed opportunity in the supporting players who surround Maddie and Percy. We could’ve used a couple of wildcards in there amping up the anarchic. Still, it’s tough to quibble on this too much when the film wryly throws away lines referencing Broderick’s chequered past as a motorist.

No Hard Feelings is a timely reminder that comedies – decent comedies – play great in the cinema. Too often of late these titles have been consigned to the anonymous gutters of streaming services. One supposes because they don’t prioritise visual bombast and so are considered lesser and/or disposal. Something it’s okay to have on while doing something else. But what fun it is to give yourself over to something like this, and in a public forum where everyone’s having a good time. Maybe I missed that sensation, but a movie theatre felt like just the right environment for this. More please.

As a total sidebar, this is the second American film in a month that I’ve seen in which someone tries to order a Pepsi and is disappointed that Coke is the only option. What the hell is going on? Americans are fucked up.