Comedy, like sex work, is real work and both can have a tough time gaining acceptance in the respectable world, so it’s a pleasure to find a comedy about bought sex that’s pretty funny – and funnier than the pun in the title might suggest. Gene Stupnitsky co-wrote and directed the amusing bad-taste romp Good Boys, and now he gives us another age-gap comedy about a very unsentimental education.
The scene is Montauk in New York state, famously the location for TV series The Affair. Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie, a woman in her early 30s who has been unlucky in love, who still lives in her childhood home, all alone since the death of her mother and not much idea about what to do with her life. She scratches a living as an Uber driver, but her car gets repossessed for non-payment of Montauk’s exorbitant property taxes on a house which she stubbornly won’t rent or sell to the arrogant tourist incomers who are pricing locals like her out of the neighbourhood.
