No Hard Anything
Jennifer Lawrence’s calculated reinvention as Adult Actor continues, with less fart joking, more daddy issues.
No hard Feelings
Director: Gene Stupnitsky • Writers: Gene Stupnitsky, John Phillips
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Matthew Broderick, Scott MacArthur, Kyle Mooney
USA • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong June 22 • IIB
Grade: B
In typical Hollywood fashion, when Jennifer Lawrence landed on everyone’s radar after a strong breakout performance in Winter’s Bone in 2010, agents, producers, and directors couldn’t cram her into enough. She was “just like us,” and at one point, the less abrasive Amy Schumer – who J.Law was BFFs with at some point, maybe? – seemed to be everywhere after the monster success of the The Hunger Games, which capitalised on and simultaneously cemented her persona as down-to-earth and unaffected. She was farting and falling all over the place, calling out Hollywood hypocrisy for labelling her “fat” in its insular world, and being indulged by David O Russell. What was that vacuuming scene in American Hustle? What the ever-loving fuck was Joy? Not all of this was Lawrence’s fault. The Hollywood machine is designed to overexpose young actors, make us embrace them, then compel us to reject them for being too in our faces. Where the Hollywood machine put them. Oy!
Lawrence seemed to recognise this, and rather abruptly dropped out of the limelight around the time of the dumpster fire that was Red Sparrow, laid low, got married and had a baby. She started to get picky in her film choices, re-emerging with Adam McKay’s well-intentioned but sloppy Don’t Look Up, and her first Charlize-Theron-Uglied-Up-In-Monster role in Causeway, as a soldier with PTSD. In No Hard Feelings, she tries on straight comedy for the first time, if you don’t count Passengers.
Not the raunch you’re expecting
Why is this important? Because director Gene Stupnitsky (whose only other feature so far is Good Boys, starring the painfully overexposed Jacob Tremblay) relies on all of us remembering how much we liked Jennifer Lawrence to start with; how much we appreciated her fresh, anti-glamorous, DGAF image. It’s important because we have to sit down at No Hard Feelings and know in our guts that a 32-year-old woman, Maddie (Lawrence), is going to do right by the introverted, 19-year-old Percy (mostly theatre kid Andrew Barth Feldman) after his over-protective parents Laird and Allison Becker (Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick) hire her – they offer actual payment – to bring him out of his shell ahead of going off to Princeton. No, no, no. This isn’t grooming comedy (this never flies if the genders are reversed). We have to believe Maddie/Lawrence is so desperate to keep her mother’s home in swish resort town Montauk (basically the Hamptons) and so powerless in the face of wealthy, gentrifying, weekend elites she agrees to an awful concept – which she fully recognises as awful. But what’s a gig-working, two-job-holding woman with spiking property taxes to do?
No Hard Feelings is like a throwback to an ’80s teen sex comedy (check out that title in Chinese), just without the sex, and one that actively leans into its wrongness for its chuckles – which are more amusing than laugh-out-loud hilarious. Despite what the trailer (surprise, most of the best bits are in the trailer) may suggest, this is not a Schumer-style, early-Judd Apatow raunch-com. It’s a low-key coming-of-age dramedy with a sweet gooey centre. The only real “raunchy” scene involves Maddie coaxing the shy Percy into skinny dipping one night and then verbally smacking down a bunch of entitled vacationers who try to steal their clothes for shits and giggles. She’s naked. CGIed but naked. For a couple of minutes, it’s a class comedy.
Bottom line? No Hard Feelings is harmless, unchallenging and forgettable, even if it strains credulity that guys on the verge of university would look at Jennifer Lawrence and think, “Ewww, an old.” It’s entertaining enough in the moment, but it evaporates the minute the lights come up. And like any self-respecting ’80s teen sex comedy the film ultimately reinforces all that his good and “normal”. Maddie appears to make amends with Gary (Ebon “I’m not Chris O’Dowd” Moss-Bachrach), the last in a string of lovers whose hearts she broke; he might be The One. Both Maddie and Percy find a way to muddle through their daddy issues together, grow a little, and come out the other side better people. Maddie’s Montauk besties Sara and Jim (Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur) get the home they deserve for their budding family. Reservation Dogs’ Zahn McLarnon gets the film’s best joke without saying a word, by simply listening to Maddie put her foot in her mouth by going on and on about rich white people moving in and forcing her from her home. Does he know how that feels? It’s a great moment, and more like it would have made No Hard Feelings the kind of brutally honest comedy we all think Lawrence is capable of. — DEK