You Hurt My Feelings review: Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch art imitate life

You Hurt My Feelings.

SHE SAW

This film couldn’t have covered a more sensitive subject for us as a couple. You Hurt My Feelings is about an author, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who accidentally overhears her husband divulging that he doesn’t like her latest book. When we left the cinema, Greg asked the inevitable: “So, did you actually like my book?” And down an eggshell-laden rabbit hole we went.

It’s such a small event to base an entire movie on and yet that event opens an enormous cavern of human emotion that could easily sustain a much longer movie. Writer/director Nicole Holofcener is in her element with this kind of slice-of-life story that centres around relatable neuroses. In many ways she’s a younger and less problematic Woody Allen. Like in most of her other films (Friends With Money, Lovely and Amazing, Walking and Talking), Holofcener explores the complex emotional turmoil we all wade through on a daily basis when very little out of the ordinary has happened. The worlds she creates are the antithesis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Despite not a lot happening, every scene - most of which are about the unravelling of Beth - is funny, real and truly engaging. I was aware going into the film that it was going to be “good” and that I should like it. But I was concerned that it would be like a number of “good,” slightly off-kilter, talk-heavy films that I watched in the late 90s and found boring but pretended to like when I was around people whose opinions I thought mattered. I don’t need to do that with this film.

Louis-Dreyfus is never not funny and proves an effortlessly competent dramatic actor in this as well. It’s a very small cast with excellent performances by Arian Moayed and Michaela Watkins as the charming and hilarious other couple in the middle of the dishonesty debacle. The film of course brings up the question of whether honesty is really what we want from our partners. Would Beth have been better off never finding out her husband’s true feelings about her book, the marriage continuing happily with just the tiniest little untruth existing under the surface? Or, is the marriage stronger because that pea under their marital bed has been exposed? Was something in their otherwise successful marriage irreparably broken by the revelation of deceit or not? It’s the kind of dinner party conversation that could be debated for hours and never definitively resolved.

I loved Greg’s book and, in response to his question, I reminded him I was nothing like Beth’s husband: I’d already told him everything I didn’t like about it in painful detail during the editing process. He’d probably have preferred I lied about it.

HE SAW

The question at the centre of this movie is: should we tell people, especially those closest to us, that we don’t think they’re very good at things, especially the things they care most about? Obviously we don’t need a movie to tell us the answer, which is: no, of course we shouldn’t, don’t be ridiculous, what’s wrong with you, have you never been in a relationship?

When your spouse asks what you think of, for example, his book, the only acceptable answer is that it’s the best book you’ve ever read. Not “among the best” or even “one of the best”. In fact, just to be safe, you should stick with something like, “by far/easily the best”. This is not just the right thing to do for your relationship, but the right thing to do morally.

That’s because there is no “correct” response to creative work. It is never “good” or “bad”. The only reason we think otherwise is because an industry of criticism has emerged and grown, leading those of us susceptible to the opinions of the powerful and articulate to be convinced of it. This all started with Aristotle, whose officious ramblings about the primacy of three-act structure have been passed down, more or less unchallenged, for millennia, as if they were based on some immutable truth and not just the reckons of a mind that also offered arguments in favour of slavery and the inferiority of women.

The truth is that the human response to a book is too complex and irrational for us to judge it on anything as simple as its adherence to principles of causation, escalation, thematic unity, or whatever else “critics” might say constitutes quality. You need only scroll from the five-star reviews to the one-star reviews for any given book on Goodreads to remind you we’re a species that can’t agree on anything.

Zanna advocated for us to review this movie, fully aware it would raise the difficult subject of her response to my book, Rugby Head, published last year by Penguin Random House.

The book offers a unique and deeply personal insight into the mental and emotional effects of rugby and rugby culture on New Zealand rugby fans, and would make a great gift in this Rugby World Cup year. But is it any good? Obviously, that’s for others to judge, specifically Zanna, whose opinion is far more important to me than Aristotle’s and who, when I asked her after the movie, said: “Like I told you at the time, I’m just too close to the subject matter to be able to comment on its quality.”

John Campbell, who wrote the cover blurb, loved it.

You Hurt My Feelings is in cinemas now.