I don’t know if you’ve heard, but a crisis is brewing with the youth of America. Research has revealed that its latest generation of teenagers has become increasingly disinterested in the rites of passage embraced by previous generations: driving, dating, drinking, sex — you name it, these kids would apparently rather hole up in their room and stare at a screen. As you can imagine, these studies have also revealed an uptick in introversion and social awkwardness, which is prone to happen in a world where interaction isn’t as necessary as it once was. It, of course, proves to be a huge problem when they finally do have to interact with the real world, whether it’s in college or the workforce. I’ll leave it to the experts to debate the causes and remedies of this arrested development, mostly because I don’t have a clue. I don’t think the folks behind NO HARD FEELINGS do, either, but they do offer one of the more wild solutions imaginable when it comes to getting a teenage boy out of his shell in 2023: send Jennifer Lawrence in to “date” him — if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
That’s the premise of this rare bird of an R-rated, raunchy star vehicle, a movie that was once a staple of Hollywood programming before the industry abandoned them in favor of increasingly expensive blockbuster tentpoles. NO HARD FEELINGS makes a fine case that it should reconsider, especially whenever Lawrence is involved. She’s no doubt the star here as Maddie, a 32-year-old woman suffering from arrested development in her own right. Despite her talent for surfing and her dreams of riding Californian waves, she’s stuck in her hometown of Montauk, where she struggles to make ends meet as a bartender and an Uber driver. The latter becomes even more difficult when her car is repossessed, leaving Maddie unable to pay the mounting bills and tax collectors coming to take her house next. Desperate, she answers a bizarre classified ad from The Beckers, a pair of helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who have sheltered their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) so much that they now need an “experienced” woman to get him ready for college. Even though she’s about a decade older than they’d prefer, The Beckers give Maddie carte blanche to seduce their son in spite of his extreme reluctance. In exchange, she’ll receive the car that she needs to get back on the road.
When I first saw the trailer for NO HARD FEELINGS, I was surprised a major studio was willing to produce something that seems so risque in 2023. Teen sex comedies were also a staple of Hollywood once upon a time, but we’ve understandably become more uneasy about this sort of material, so this genre has become an endangered species too, making it all the more noteworthy when one does emerge. This one feels especially daring, armed with a plot device right out of the PRIVATE LESSONS and MY TUTOR mold that finds an older woman showing a teenager the ropes — or at least trying to. Percy’s reluctance is the big wrinkle here. There’s no shortage of virginity quest comedies, but this one flips the dynamic on its head by portraying its virgin as a nebbish, hopeless romantic who can’t imagine having sex with someone he doesn’t love. NO HARD FEELINGS gets a lot of mileage out of this dynamic, particularly during the early-going, when Lawrence and Feldman are able to lean into the awkwardness of it all.
Certainly, the film’s biggest laughs arise from this stretch, which finds Maddie overdoing her advances, much to Percy’s dismay and discomfort. It’s fair to say that this is the film’s one good joke, this grown-ass woman trying to jump the bones of this (rightfully) freaked-out kid who deploys mace instead of his hormones. There’s the incongruity of it all, of course, but it’s also very funny to see a comedic formula gone haywire. Comedy often relies on the element of surprise, and director Gene Stupnitsky and co-writer John Phillips delight in zigging and zagging through the familiar beats: the outrageous sexual overtures, the humorous misunderstandings, the extremely awkward interactions.
Lawrence especially handles it all with ease, masterfully handling the quippy dialogue with sharp timing and embracing the slapstick hysterics in equal measure. She’s a natural comedic talent because it all feels natural: Maddie is obviously an outrageous caricature, the latest example of a woman taking on the juvenile antics that were once reserved for man-children, but Lawrence works to dig beneath the familiar, clichéd facade to find some humanity for a woman desperate to keep her home. It helps that the script also bothers to give the character some depth with her long-standing resentment towards the obscenely rich tourists who have descended on her hometown and started to push long-time residents out, including her two friends (Natalie Morales and Scott McArthur providing some additional comedic support), reviving the old snobs vs slobs dynamic for the 21st-century gentrification landscape, even if it is lacking any real bite in this arena (the best bit involves Maddie refusing to cater to an obnoxious rich guy at her bar).
Likewise, once the film gets past its premise, it eases off of the edginess and starts to color inside of the lines to become a more conventional, warm-hearted comedy. You know how it goes: the more Percy resists Maddie’s advances, the more she begins to realize she actually likes this kid. Just as he needs to loosen up and have a good time, she needs to learn to become a more responsible adult and reckon with a dead-end life that’s found her jumping from one loser to another for a series of ill-fated relationships and one-night stands. As a comedy, NO HARD FEELINGS peaks early with an unexpected fight scene that finds Maddie pummeling some snotty kids who have stolen her clothes while she and Percy go skinny-dipping. Understandably, it’s hard for any film to top the sight of a fully nude Jennifer Lawerence delivering back suplexes to some kids, so NO HARD FEELINGS can’t help but settle down and settle in. It’s not that it completely abandons the comedy — it’s just that it’s careful not to push its one note too terribly hard and its rowdy energy begins to simmer into a pot-boiler of sorts, waiting to erupt once Percy learns this relationship began as a transaction.
And so it dutifully works towards that point, taking the occasional detour into both the poignant (Feldman is tasked with doing a piano rendition of Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” and knocks it out of the park) and the absurd (there’s a clause that voids the arrangement if Percy manages to lose his virginity to someone else first, so his trip to a college party becomes perilous). Despite a provocative premise that riled up the Extremely Online crowd (so much so that Stupnitsky and company issued a statement defending their silly comedy), NO HARD FEELINGS is fairly harmless, and it’s probably a little sweeter than it should be — meaning it’s a little less funny than it should be. However, it’s also just about exactly as charming as it needs to be, and the joke is ultimately at the expense of the uptight parents that have meticulously curated their kids’ lives into an oblivion of anxiety and awkwardness. It’s not that the kids aren’t alright — it’s their parents that need to ease up and let their kids live a little, a familiar refrain that’s echoed throughout the teen comedy genre. The words may be changed in NO HARD FEELINGS, but the song remains the same: let the kids screw around. And if they get too far out of line, send Jennifer Lawrence in to take them to Suplex City.
Tags: Andrew Barth Feldman, Brent White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Eigil Bryld, Gene Stupnitsky, Hasan Minhaj, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Rose Weiss, John Phillip, Kyle Mooney, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick, Mychael Danna, Natalie Morales, Scott MacArthur, Zahn McClarnon
No Comments