Working Stiff

"No Hard Feelings" is a parable for our time

For Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) of The Graduate (1967), the issue was a soulless world that offered “plastics” as a solution to the problem of meaning. For Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), the issue was a soulless world that just couldn’t understand that material boys just want to have fun. But the issue for Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) of the new movie No Hard Feelings is that he’s a soulless non-rebel without a cause, too attached to his parents and his phone to connect with anyone IRL. Which makes him an archetypal character in contemporary youth culture.

Here's something else that makes No Hard Feelings, which opens today, a document of our time: its sly deconstruction of the American ruling class. The movie is set in Montauk, on the far southeastern edge of Long Island. This was once a place that was decidedly not the Hamptons but which in recent decades has been thoroughly colonized by gentrifiers, much to the dismay of locals like thirtysomething Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a precariat Uber driver/bartender whose car has just been repossessed and is about to lose the modest cape house left to her by her mother because she owes back property taxes. In one telling moment, she finds herself unwillingly landing at a party for admitted Princeton students whose manicured racial diversity and exquisite gender politics underwrite ferocious class condescension expressed in weaponized phones recording every untoward word and gesture.

Oh. And one other thing. No Hard Feelings is a hilarious slapstick comedy.

It’s very high concept: helicopter parents hire a sexy young—well, youngish—woman to provide an initiation to an awkward son desperately in need of socializing. The first joke here is one of casting: dad is played by Matthew Broderick—Ferris Bueller himself. His wife is played by Laura Benati, best known as a stage star, who’s somehow likable and believable here as an overinvolved mom. Newcomer Feldman is a bit of a cipher as the Princeton-bound 19-year-old, but that’s as it should be, and as per the conventions of the rom-com, we watch him come out of his shell. The supporting players are uniformly excellent. The screenplay by John Philips sings, and the direction of Gene Stupnitsky is proficient.

But the movie belongs to Lawrence. Over the course of a decade-long career that includes the Hunger Games saga (2012-15, with one on the way) to her Oscar-winning role in The Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Lawrence has become, with apologies to Jennifer Lopez, Jenny from the block: a refreshingly down-to-earth movie star. Here we see her get pepper-sprayed, brawl on the beach, outrun cops, and repeatedly try to seduce an utterly hopeless nebbish she describes as “encased in bubble wrap.”

The trailer for the film (above) is something of a greatest-hits reel, and I worried that would be all there was, but there’s plenty more, gag-wise and otherwise. Inevitably, the two form an unlikely bond, one sign of which is a memorable piano performance of the 1982 Hall & Oates hit “Maneater”—a richer piece of pop craft than I realized. Of course Percy learns about his parents’ ruse, adding the inevitable layer of complication before the film’s sweet conclusion.

All of which to say that No Hard Feelings is an utterly conventional movie, which is what’s so great about it. Credible romantic comedies are increasingly hard to come by both as commercial propositions and as workable premises in a polite culture whose insistence on enlightenment has become increasingly brittle.

But never mind any of that.  Go see No Hard Feelings. The humor is explosive.