Film Review: No Hard Feelings

 

Sexuality/Nudity Objectionable

Violence Acceptable
Vulgarity Objectionable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Objectionable

I am not someone who is easily offended by raunchy humor.  I don't say this as a brag.  In fact, it may be a personal defect.  I love movies like Ted and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.  But vulgarity for its own sake is not funny.  There has to be real wit and humor underneath.  And even if this is the case, there can come a tipping point where the increase in vulgarity brings a diminishing return.  Judd Apatow made this point when he said that you have to be careful when parodying pornography because it too easily slips into becoming pornography.

I bring this up to explain my thoughts on No Hard Feelings.

Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) is a working class resident of Montauk, who is trying to make ends meet by being an Uber driver for the rich people who summer there.  But she is in danger of losing her house and her car gets repossessed.  However, she answers an ad from a rich couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who have a 19-year-old son named Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) who has just graduated high school and is set to go to Princeton.  However, because of his parents' constant coddling, he is completely unprepared for the social dimension of college.  This couple hires Maddie to "date" Percy to get him out of his shell and in return she will get a car.

The premise, while gross, is actually fertile ground for comedy.

The best thing about this movie are the performances by Lawrence and Feldman.  This is the first time I really saw Lawrence stretch her comedic chops and she was fantastic.  Her Maddie is aggressive, rude, vile, lustful, and greedy.  But Lawrence's charisma and good humor makes us follow Maddie's journey.  She is strong and quick-witted and Lawrence lets us see a little bit of the vulnerability underneath it all.  Feldman does a wonderful job playing the man-child, where everything in the adult world terrifies him.  The way he jumped at the unexpected sound of billiard balls breaking made me laugh out loud.  The chemistry that these two have is at the heart of the movie.  They play off of each other because they are both mature and immature in opposite ways.  She is too reckless and he is too cautious.  

The movie works best when the Gene Stupnitsky really uses the visuals to sell the gags.  When Maddie first appears at Percy's work to seduce him, she enters the frame like a horror movie villain.  She later gives Percy a ride and Stupintsky films the sequence from Percy's paranoid perspective where he thinks he is being kidnapped, with the sketchy van and everything.  There is also an hysterical sequence involving a train that is insane and an hilarious at the same time.  The movie also works well when it takes pot-shots at modern society and its weird phobias and sensitivities.

The script is only sporadically witty.  There are some genuinely funny lines.  When Maddie entices Percy to come skinny dipping in the ocean he asks "Isn't this how Jaws started?"  That line had me laughing for way longer than anyone in the theater because it was exactly what I was thinking.  Unfortunately, the humor is not consistent.  There are several other unfunny bits like Maddie trying to get up steps in rollerblades or banter with her unfunny married friends Sara (Natalie Morales) and Jim (Scott MacArthur).  

Often it feels like the script when through so many revisions that characters and threads were lost.  Zahn McClarnon has a small part as her friend and lawyer who appears in two short scenes in the first act and then never comes back again.  Amalia Yoo also shows up as a classmate of Percy but exits without another mention soon after two scenes.  There seems to be a lack of strong set up and payoff.

But the real problem with the movie is that it delves too deeply into the vulgarity.  There is an extended scene of graphic nudity that was completely unnecessary.  With a little creativity you could have had the comedic effect without the vulgarity.  In addition, the story pushes a few too many immoral buttons.  It is true that there is character growth on the part of both characters, but they don't develop far enough.

This is a shame, because with a little restraint and tweaking, this could have been the funniest movie of the year.  Unfortunately, they rely too much on shock than humor.