It tracks that writer-director Nicole Holofcener would devote an entire movie to the queasily uncomfortable limits of honesty in relationships, given how her work, from Walking and Talking to Friends with Money, has always traded on her ability to be unblinkingly frank about how we treat one another. How honest should we be to those we care about if we know our answers will hurt them? Is lying to protect feelings ultimately a sign of real love or is it the opposite, allowing someone to develop a false idea of who they are and what they can do? And what happens when they find out how you really feel?
In You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener takes these gristly questions and uses them to poke holes in an otherwise annoyingly happy, borderline smug, marriage. Writer-professor Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and therapist Don (Tobias Menzies) are as copacetic as could be, still passionate, still sharing each other’s meals (much to the disgust of their son) and still supporting each other professionally. Beth is coming off the back of a well-reviewed yet under-read memoir detailing the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her father (she darkly wishes at times he had been worse so it could have sold more copies) and is trying to get her first novel published. Even after her agent finally confesses that she’s unsure of its commercial viability, Don continues to tell her how talented she is and, having read every draft, how fantastic her book will be.
