(courtesy IMP Awards)
Even the most honest among us has, at some point or another (or, let’s be honest, many, many points), told a white lie to grease the wheels of social interaction.
We may not like something someone’s created or the way they do one aspect of their job but we like them, often a great deal, and so in the interests of being supportive and being a good friend, lover or partner, we say what needs to be said, truthfulness be damned.
But what happens when the complicity of twisting the truth just so finds the light of day? Can a relationship recover from the white lie being exposed for the benign falsity it is?
That’s the central question percolating accusingly away in writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s new film, You Hurt My Feelings, which examines what happens when one otherwise happy chilled and enjoyable weekend day a wife (Beth played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her supposedly devoted husband (Don played by Tobias Menzies) admitting to his brother-in-law (Mark played by Arian Moayed) that he doesn’t love his beloved’s latest book.
It devastates Beth who is labouring under a sense that she could have done better as a writer and that she is inferior to a number of other writers out there, a common malady for most, if not all, writers, and which is reinforced when her college creative writing class which she teaches have not read Beth’s memoir but have happily devoured another author’s non-fictional work.
Perennially worried that she doesn’t quite have what it takes, Beth relies on Don’s validation to bolster her own inner monologue’s lack of consistent support, and when that appears to not be as robust as she thought, she crumbles and shuts a bewildered Don out who’s struggling with some career issues of his own.
When she finally confronts Don, rather embarrassingly for everyone at a birthday dinner for Mark at which Beth’s close sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) is also in attendance, Don initially keeps the pretense up until it very clearly emerges that Beth is not buying what her husband is desperately selling.
It’s a shellshock for them both because one of the things implicit in any close relationship is that that person has your back, and that in a world where people let you down, deliberately or not, here’s one person who won’t ever fail to keep you buoyed, smiling and upright.
When Beth hears Don admit he doesn’t like her book – and to be fair, it’s not in a malicious way; more of a weary admission that’s coupled with a concern about what to say to her, if anything – it shakes that bedrock assumption and makes her question whether anything about their relationship is true.
Now, being a reasonably gentle though emotionally honest slice-of-life drama which moves from scene to scene with warmly insightful momentum, superbly nuanced performances and some very smart writing, You Hurt My Feelings isn’t some relational cataclysm wrought by melodrama and intense angst.
Rather, it gives its characters, and principally Beth and Don – Sarah and Mark have their own issues to handle but they are a little more honest with each other and when they’re not, are sensible enough not to break the spell of endlessly unconditional supportiveness – time to work out what this kind of honesty means to them and whether it is an explosive a revelation as Beth believes.
Standing in stark contrast to their own struggles with honesty are the relationship, career and artistic struggles of their only child, 23-year-old Elliott (Owen Teague) who doesn’t always get it right but who’s willingness to say it like it is is an interesting counterpoint to his parents.
He doesn’t necessarily tell the truth any more than Beth or Don but his willingness to entertain that marks him as somewhat of an outlier in a film where honesty can be devastating (and in Elliott’s case, eventually is in a form where he has to grapple with the chaos wrought by being wholly upfront).
At its heart, You Hurt My Feelings is one of those thoughtfully funny and emotionally ruminative films that actually asks some fairly pertinent questions and answers them in a grounded way that suggests there’s not necessarily a perfect way to handle raw, unfettered honesty and that if we do happen to encounter it, especially from someone we unquestioningly love and trust to have our back at all times, that it may not be quite as cataclysmic as we think.
It might, in fact, be the making of you and that special someone, and force you to consider what really lies beneath all the transactional niceties and whether they are enough to sustain an occasional foray into the cold, unvarnished truth.
Quite where Beth and Don land is best left to the watching of You Hurt My Feelings but suffice to say that as you watch it, you are given cause to wonder how you’d handle the pricking of the everything-my-partner-tells-me-is-truth bubble.
Would you collapse into self pity and temporary grief like Beth or would you shrug it off as nothing much like Don until you realise maybe it is something reasonably big, but not unsolvable after all?
The chances are you you’d likely do both, depending on where on the handling honesty journey you are, something that comes into sharp relief as Beth and Don try to fold unexpected revelations into an otherwise robustly loving relationship of long standing.
Anchored by Holofcener’s wittily insightful writing and performances that make the words sparkle and zing even more, and not a little humour because at the heart of things, there’s a great deal of humour to be mined out of these types of situations, You Hurt My Feelings is a superb look at the mechanics that govern any close relationship and whether all that greasing of the wheel by white lies and convenient omissions can withstand the brusquely honest light of day and where, in all that unfamiliar territory, things might lead, and if in fact, that might not be such a bad thing to happen, after all.