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?
