No Hard Feelings ★★★
(MA15+) 103 minutes
It doesn’t take long to become an “older woman,” as far as Hollywood is concerned. In the intermittently funny No Hard Feelings, the 32-year-old Jennifer Lawrence joins the club, although it feels like just the other day she was known for acting wiser than her years opposite significantly older men.
In No Hard Feelings Jennifer Lawrence plays an Uber driver whose car is reposessed.Credit: Macall Polay/Sony Pictures via AP
It’s all relative, of course. The joke of No Hard Feelings, directed by Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys) is that Lawrence gets involved with a boy not long out of high school, although the word “involved’ needs some clarifying. Her character, Maddie, is a Montauk bartender and Uber driver who has her car repossessed, leaving her in urgent need of an extra side hustle.
Scrolling through Craigslist, she spies an ad from a well-off couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) seeking a woman to date their brainy but awkward 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) over the summer – bringing him out of his shell before he heads off for college, while keeping him in the dark about the true nature of the arrangement.
Fronting up for her job interview with a practised service-industry smile, Maddie admits she’s a little older than the ideal candidate being sought: she recently turned 29, “recently” meaning a couple of years back. Nor does she consider herself a sex worker, although her eyes are open about what the gig entails.
Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman make an unlikely pair. Credit: Macall Polay/Sony Pictures via AP
But beggars can’t be choosers, on both sides, and the task looks no more painful than many of Maddie’s past sexual experiences, or indeed her professional ones catering to rich tourists. So she pours herself into a figure-hugging pink dress and heads for the animal shelter where Percy volunteers, only to discover that he is, indeed, a sensitive soul – too sensitive to respond straight away to her impatiently practical brand of seduction.
No Hard Feelings makes no pretence of social realism, which is for the best: Stupnitsky and his co-writer John Phillips (Dirty Grandpa) don’t seem especially qualified to be commenting on the generation gap between millennials and current teenagers, nor on the challenges faced by those in lower income groups.
Still, the mildly discomforting premise raises numerous questions that feel of the moment. Should the physically slight Percy be seen as the child he often acts like, or the man he legally is? Is there something automatically predatory about Maddie’s advances, even factoring out the deceit involved? How differently would we feel if the gender roles were reversed? If we’re talking power dynamics, where do money and class enter in?
It’s richer material than anything in the last season’s worth of superhero blockbusters, and with big-screen Hollywood comedy at a low ebb, perhaps we should be thankful that No Hard Feelings exists at all. Not too thankful, however. Despite a handful of envelope-pushing gags, this is raunchiness at its most sanitised, as if Stupnitsky had received an endless stream of notes from a studio having second thoughts.
No Hard Feelings raises numerous questions that feel of the moment.Credit: Macall Polay/Sony Pictures via AP
The movie might have moved up a gear if Feldman were more of a comic talent – or just an unfiltered weirdo, as very young actors sometimes can be. But he plays Percy all too straightforwardly as a shy, well-meaning kid, as if he were too grateful for his big break to make any attempt to steal the show. Even when he gets to display his musical chops, the scene is more about Lawrence’s silent reactions than anything else.
Lawrence has retained her own version of that unfiltered quality, letting us glimpse something beyond the kooky everygirl routine the script demands – a picture of a woman at once boxed in and out of control, ramping up her hot-to-trot act to the point of parody without being sure where her real desires lie.
Alongside the pratfalls and the wisecracks, there’s an element of genuine drama as we wait to see where the relationship between Maddie and Percy is headed. Will they finally wind up in bed together after all – and if so, is there a chance this could be anything other than a terrible idea?
But where Lawrence seems fearless, the filmmakers handle things so gingerly that a different question feels more pressing. Assuming that sex comedies are designed to titillate on some level, whose fantasy is No Hard Feelings ultimately supposed to be?
No Hard Feelings is in cinemas from June 22.
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2023-06-21 12:00:00Z
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