A hot button issue in recent cinema criticism – well, warm button anyway – is the eradication of intelligent mid-budget dramas in the Hollywood system. Making decently acted, well-written, approachable, middle to upper-middlebrow movies with three or four grownup leads for theatrical release used to be an honourable tradition. Now it’s getting squeezed out by franchise products, and maybe because producers dread an eye-rolling comment of “first world problems” at the pitch meeting.
But writer-director Nicole Holofcener is keeping the flag flying with her shrewd, talky movies about middle-aged anxiety. I wasn’t a fan of Friends With Money, but Enough Said, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini, was a terrific romantic comedy. Now there is You Hurt My Feelings, a smart, if faintly exhausting comedy about midlife disillusionment with a lot of bitter in the bittersweet. Articulate, depressed, middle-aged people in New York with classy jobs, impossible aged parents and tricky twentysomething kids, have chance encounters in stores and on the streets and later confide tensely to each other about the resulting conversations. It’s very much in the template that Woody Allen and Nora Ephron made famous, but with winces and groans where the laughs would otherwise go.
