When the romantic comedy No Hard Feelings uses Hall and Oates’s Maneater both on the soundtrack and the dialogue, it has found an effective way to express the ambivalence of this romance between an aging millennial, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), and its immature gen Zer, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). The faintly screwball-like comedy is initially a transaction between Maddie, who needs money, and Percy’s parents to help him grow up before he, 19 years old, goes as a freshman to Princeton.
While the formula demands Percy eventually find out Maddie’s motivation, in between are set pieces that alternate between the requisite growing affection between the two lonely principals and the unusual alienation between them, a generation apart as they struggle with surviving (Maddie must get funds to pay her property taxes, and he must decide about loving her and going to Princeton).
The story turns on the tension, like the Chinese finger pull, between love and practicality, deception and love (the parents of course try to trick him into maturity). The story is not a simple comedy about ill-matched lovers but also about survival on several levels.
One of those levels is Maddie’s struggle to keep the house in upscale Montauk that she inherited but must pay its increasing property taxes affected by those foreigners who increase the taxes by paying large sums for old homes. That invasion forces residents like Maddie to give up their homes to the invaders. Percy and family are vacationers, destined never to be fully accepted. The film acknowledges Maddie’s dilemma as part of a cultural shift emanating from alien invasion.
What distinguishes this dramedy from the great screwball comedies of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s is a general lack of witty lines. For example, when Maddie contests some beach rowdies, she sends them off with, “Stay the f***k out of Montauk.” It is only an amusing line, nothing great in all the script. Seeing Lawrence fully naked is disquieting rather than raucous. Not that that’s a bad thing!
Like the invaders of Montauk, we theatergoers visit No Hard Feelings hoping for laughs that will relieve the heat and troubles of our own summers. The film delivers some laughs, appealing romantic lovers, and social concerns that hover around the disenfranchisement of land owners. That’s enough lightness for any summer.
No Hard Feelings
Director: Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys)
Screenplay: Stupnitsky, John Phillips (Dirty Grandpa)
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence (Hunger Games, Winter’s Bone)
Run Time: 1h 43 m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
