The premise of You Hurt My Feelings, a new movie by Nicole Holofcener starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is deceptively simple: to what degree, when asked for your opinion by a spouse or equivalent, do you tell them the truth? Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer whose husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is her primary cheerleader until she overhears him expressing negative opinions about her new book. Anyone who has ever produced anything at all will die at the accuracy of this scene and identify with Beth’s instinct to throw up in the nearest bin. The movie asks if the husband has been right to conceal his true feelings, and if she is right to react as she does.
The cleverness of the set-up is in how endlessly applicable it is and how disproportionate the feelings are that these kinds of incidents trigger. Most of us have been on both sides of this equation, struggling to find the right answer when a partner asks: “How do I look in this?”, and also trying to temper our own neediness when asking (pleading) for similar reassurances. As Don discovers, there is often no winning: overpraise may be rejected as rote and therefore worthless, but anything that tips even close to frank criticism risks triggering a rage spiral. Meanwhile, as he points out in defensive frustration, the world is going to hell in a handcart and this is what she freaks out about?
It’s an unfair observation, somewhat defensively presented in the script – perhaps to ward off similar accusations about the movie. But the question of these sensitivities and the presumption behind it – that we get less sure, not more, about things as we age – stands, and is echoed in other recent productions, namely Platonic, a new show on Apple TV+ in which Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen endure different iterations of midlife collapse. All these protagonists live relatively easeful lives in art-directed versions of New York and LA. All are disgruntled with the places in which they find themselves; Byrne’s character seethes with resentment at having given up work as a lawyer to raise her and her husband’s three kids. And all hang their disgruntlement on ostensibly small missteps inadvertently taken by their loved ones.
Except, of course, these things never feel small when they happen to you. If these shows are to some extent about happiness, or self-esteem, or the interface between those two things, they remind us how fragile and babyish and needy most of us are at an age when we might have imagined we’d have grown out of it. In the Holofcener movie, the couple’s young adult son goes off on a whiny rant about how they’ve ruined him through overenthusiasm. How, he asks his parents, is he supposed to figure out what he is good at when, as a child, they showered him with such blanket support that he developed a thoroughly delusional view of his own abilities?
This is part of a wider discussion about the prizes-for-all flavour of much modern parenting and it’s a smart reversal, on the part of the writer, to locate it alongside the way adults interact with each other. What, then, is the answer? Where does the white lie of a kneejerk “it’s great, honey!” shade from support into unhelpful pandering? One is reminded, oddly, of Simon Cowell and the first flush justification he used to use for his judging panels: that the ruthless piercing of the contestants’ delusions did them a favour in the long run.
Neither Holofcener nor the makers of Platonic come to any firm conclusion, beyond the fact that the instinct to protect those we love from painful truths is a decent one, and entirely necessary if we expect to enjoy the same soft landing. I have seen families in which other principles dominate, and the phrase “I’m just being honest” is used as a Trojan horse for all sorts of undermining and vaguely abusive behaviour. (And of course, in these contexts, there is often no more honesty at work than in gentler environments, given the undeclared kick the person criticising may be getting out of it). The only surety, given how febrile we all are, is that if it’s impossible to get it right all of the time, the good faith of the effort goes a long way.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
