Limp sex comedy offers few laughs
Actress and producer Jennifer Lawrence’s new film No Hard Feelings is being promoted as a sex comedy. The big problem, though, is that the picture features almost no sex and even less comedy. The film was directed by Gene Stupnitsky (Dirty Grandpa; Good Boys), who co-wrote the screenplay with fellow comedy writer John Phillips. They both were nominated for a Worst Screenplay Razzie in 2017 for their Dirty Grandpa script, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they receive similar honors for this lackluster comedic attempt.
The film’s central premise involves the parents of a smart but socially awkward, straightlaced 19-year-old young man. His parents — Mom Allison (Laura Benanti) and Dad Laird (Matthew Broderick) — hire a 32-year-old woman to feign interest in their son and have sex with him before he leaves for Princeton, to, you know, help build his confidence. Is that funny? Or is it just icky? With funny severely lacking, we’re left with icky.
Most of the film follows Maddie (Lawrence), the woman who responds to the parents’ ad, trying and failing to get the young man, Percy (Broadway star Andrew Barth Feldman, of Dear Evan Hansen), into bed so she can collect her payment from his parents. Maddie’s reward is a new car, which she needs to resume her Uber driver career to make money to pay the property taxes on the Montauk house she grew up in. She inherited the house from her dead mother and now lives there alone because her father left years ago to start a new family in New York City. As a result, Maddie has trouble connecting with anyone… and so blah blah blah. None of these plot points are very interesting, and the story unspools predictably at every turn.
The film seems to want to make a statement about overbearing helicopter parents, the displacement of locals by wealthy interlopers, and the scars left by parental neglect, but nuance and subtlety aren’t part of the filmmakers’ repertoire. When the Hall and Oates 1982 ballad “Maneater” is used as shorthand to express the movie’s themes, we know we’re in trouble.
But the bigger issue is that a comedy needs laughs, and I only heard two at the packed screening I was at. The first? When a former police drug-sniffing dog goes crazy at hearing the word “cocaine.” The second? When the dog hears the word again. If you’re a comedy screenwriter and you only generate two laughs in an hour and 45 minute movie, that’s bad enough. But when the laughs come from the repetition of a single joke, that’s even worse.
Why an actress of Oscar winner Lawrence’s caliber would agree not only to produce this insipid film, but also to star in it, is a puzzle. She’s a deft physical comedian and game for anything here (including a fully nude skinny dipping scene that goes awry), and she even makes a vapid line like “I was hurt, so I hurt people” sound almost sincere. But at least she’s surrounded herself with some terrific talent. Feldman matches her beat for beat and brings a wise sensitivity to his puppy-dog character, and Broderick and Benanti try their best to make Percy’s ridiculous parents not completely loathsome. In smaller roles, Kyle Mooney as Percy’s protective former nanny, The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Maddie’s ex, and UC Davis’s own Hasan Minhaj as a realtor interested in selling Maddie’s house provide welcome, if brief, relief from the overarching inane proceedings. If they had been in more scenes, maybe the film would have had more laughs.
The one indisputable strength the picture has going for it is its scenery. Maybe that explains Lawrence’s participation? Perhaps the film was just an excuse for her to have a seaside workplace for a while. Montauk’s beaches do look lovely, but they may call to mind a far better Montauk-set film. I’m guessing, though, that reminding viewers of the superior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is probably the last thing the filmmakers wanted to do.
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No Hard Feelings opens today at Bay Area theaters.
