After taking time out to have a kid last year, Jennifer Lawrence is back on the big screen. We’ve missed her, but though I adored huge chunks of No Hard Feelings, I fear it’s doomed – it feels like a cross between Licorice Pizza, The Worst Person in the World, a slap-dash Eighties gross-out comedy and Parasite. Which is a combo no one asked for.
Lawrence is 32-year-old Maddie, an embittered Long Islander, who’s so desperate for money that she agrees to “date”, i.e. deflower, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). He is the depressed, geeky, Princeton-bound 19-year-old son of a rich couple played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti.
During the awkward courtship, a naked Lawrence gets sweaty by the shore; a naked Percy straddles a car. What saves the film from being extremely dodgy is that it’s not trying to titillate. In its brilliant, funny and genuinely unpredictable middle section, the focus is on emotional abuse, whether inflicted by supposedly caring family members or strangers.
Is this a feminist project? Yes, if not in an obvious way. While she is only 32, our heroine’s age in this context makes her vulnerable. As far as young Percy’s posh peers are concerned, she’s a crone. Added to the fact that she’s poor, uneducated and venomous, it only makes things worse. It’s not possible for her to win over these pretty, savvy young things. They disdain her from first to last.
Plenty of recent think-pieces have bemoaned The Death of the Movie Star. But the truth is that when A-listers act like A-listers they do fine. Sandra Bullock in The Lost City; Julia Roberts in Ticket to Paradise; Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. Audiences show up to see icons on sun-kissed beaches, being fancied by the young and conventionally buff.
Audiences will watch this movie (probably in the comfort of their homes), partly because Lawrence is so charismatic, and partly because 21-year-old New Yorker Feldman is adorable and talented (never better than when performing a tenderly morose rendition of the Hall & Oates hit, Maneater). Earnest heroes are two a penny, but even so, Feldman’s Percy dazzles, as irresistible as Henry Fonda’s Hopsie in The Lady Eve (the gold standard for cosseted naïfs).
They don’t come sweeter than Percy. And there’s something about the irate Maddie that’s really and truly special. This is not a rom-com (though that’s what it pretends to be, at first). Far more ambitious, it’s a delightfully weird (if flawed) farce from a provocative star cheekily redefining what it means to grow up.
103mins, cert 15
