Now on VOD: Julia Louis-Dreyfus And Nicole Holofcener Tackle a Writer's Worst Nightmare in 'You Hurt My Feelings'

Every writer knows this fear only too well. You have a finished piece of writing in your hand. Your baby, your little paper baby. You extend your arm, holding the writing out … and, deep breath … you hand it over to the person you love the most in the world for them to read, and to judge. It might as well be the entire limb that you’re handing over to them, or a hefty scoop of your intestines — it sure feels like what I imagine having one’s intestines pulled out would feel like. There’s a sense of vertigo; of the dizziness induced by attraction and repulsion all at once. It’s as intimate an act as one can commit in a relationship, and that’s counting butt stuff.

So leave it to the great and wonderful writer-director Nicole Holofcener, one of our finest and richest and lightest-to-the-touch documentarians of modern humanity’s funny foibles (in films like Lovely & Amazing and Please Give), to turn that interpersonal tight-rope walk into a tender little laugh-riot with You Hurt My Feelings, her latest entry in a filmography so solid you could build the Tower of Babel upon it and not fear a tremor.

The myth of Babel now summoned forth, it is indeed miscommunication that’s key to the new tale here before us today. Reuniting Holofcener with previous collaborator slash comedy genius Julia Louis-Dreyfus—they made the exquisite and perfect film Enough Said with James Gandolfini (RIP King!) in 2013—You Hurt My Feelings spins a darkest timeline tale of what happens when the person you love grabs that paper-baby handful-of-intestines of yours and they spit right in its face! Right in your intestines’ face, dammit! Only in a funny way, see, and not at all like the Eli-Roth-directed Grand Guignol my stretched-to-the-snapping-point metaphor just took us.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a New York writer who’s been coasting on the fumes of her slightly successful personal memoir from several years back. In the meantime, she’s been teaching classes at the New School while doggedly trying to shape her new piece of fiction into something she can feel proud of, draft after endless draft. Thankfully—or so she thinks!—she’s got her loving husband Don (an absolutely ace Tobias Menzies, internally unraveling) on her side. A psychiatrist who’s not at all convinced he’s good at his own job, Don is Beth’s biggest cheerleader, reading through draft after endless draft and singing her praises and defending her against ungrateful agents.

Indeed Don and Beth are adorably doting sentence-finishers when the film begins—so much so that their grown son Eliot (a dopily charming Owen Teague) always feels like a third wheel when they’re around. For his own part Eliot’s trying to follow in his mother’s footsteps as a writer, but for the exact moment is content enough to work the cash register at a weed shop—current events! So hip! But Eliot is flailing a bit, unsure that all of the vociferous support from his parents is anything but white noise.

Then one fateful day Beth and her sister Sarah (the forever welcome Michaela Watkins) are out for a walk in the city and they unexpectedly spot their husbands shopping in a store. As the two women sneak up behind the men to surprise them, the unthinkable happens—Beth overhears Don disparaging her writing. In no uncertain terms. Don thinks her new book, her best new intestines, is junk. Junk for the fire—kaput! Cue that vertigo unfettered. And from here on out what we have is Julia Louis-Dreyfus doing what Julia Louis-Dreyfus was born for, which is to spiral hysterically into hysterical panic mode. Since Seinfeld there’s been no actress on earth who’s wrung so many laughs from me as she has with her teeth-clenching freak-out fits—Veep too was a master-class on this front—and You Hurt My Feelings was built to her strengths to a tee. Utter pleasure.

Of course, JLD has also proven over the years that she’s far more than Elaine throwing George’s hair-piece out of Jerry’s window, and Holofcener, bless her, keys into it all. As hard as I laughed during this movie—and at one point it legit had me crying from laughter—it’s also, like all of Holofcener’s films, sweet and genuine and perfectly human-sized. Holofcener’s movies are just always such a nice place to visit, and this one’s 100% no different. A simple and lovely fable about how honest we need to be with the people closest to us, You Hurt My Feelings is honest in every single place that it counts.