Movie Review: You Hurt My Feelings

 

Michael's Movie Grade: B+

An excellent dramedy.

This movie follows a very simple premise. A woman (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who had a semi-successful book with her memoir, writes a non-fiction book for the first time. Her husband (Tobias Menzies) tells her how much he loves the book but in reality he is just telling her this to encourage her. One day she overhears him talking to a friend, saying he doesn't really like the new book and this breaks her heart and puts a strain in their relationship. This in many ways sounds like it could be a simple episode of a sitcom and honestly such a premise would work perfectly in a sitcom. Yet this movie never feels like a sitcom stretched to feature length and in fact this film is much more introspective than the average sitcom episode would be. This works because the film taps into something that is universal, human insecurities. This film does a wonderful job of looking at this part of human nature and all of the main characters have their own insecurities. The husband even has insecurities of his own. He is a therapist, who feels like he is completely failing at his job lately. Many of us who have had a job have experienced times when we wondered if we are actually any good at our job and this movie perfectly captures how it feels to have these kinds of self-doubts as he is no longer able to find any satisfaction or sense of accomplishment and begins to simply do nothing but go through the motions as he is working. This is just as much true with the story of the wife finding out her husband was lying about liking her book. As much as we say want people to be honest with us, this movie makes us question if we really would want that. It also makes it easy to put ourselves in the main character's shoes, as it is hard to watch the movie and not wonder how we would feel in her place. The relationship between husband and wife is also at the center of this film and it is wonderfully handled. There is a real sweetness and love felt in many of their scenes together. Even the scenes in which they are fighting, you can feel how much these characters truly care for each other. All of this is handled with a good amount of heart and charm that simply seems effortless. 

This film has a really dry sense of humor. Sometimes this humor is hilarious and made me laugh out loud. Other times it could be more clever than actually funny. There were also a few times when it could fall completely flat. Still to me the times when the humor worked completely made up for the times it didn't.

This is a delightfully charming film.