Review of You Hurt My Feelings, directed by Nicole Holofcener

Some movies I probably would never hear of if I didn’t spend a ridiculous amount of time at the movie theater each week.

Sometimes I get the same trailers playing over and over again, which ends up making me not want to see the movie in question because I’m simply just so annoyed at certain aspects of the trailer, but other movies I nod along with and eventually decide to go see.

You Hurt My Feelings falls into a happy medium between the two right now. I wanted to kind of see it, but I felt like the trailer had all oft he exciting parts that would make me care about it in the first place.

I did not end up going to see the movie in theaters. Sure, I booked a ticket a few times and then cancelled it because I didn’t feel like driving all the way to the movie theater, but my chance came one day when I was wandering my local library. There, in the new DVD section, laid a copy of You Hurt My Feelings. I decided to give it a chance and watched it a couple of days later.

Anyways, enough rambling. Here’s my review.

A novelist starts quarreling with her therapist husband.

We begin this movie with learning about who are main characters are. Beth is a memoirist and writing teacher, as many writers tend to do, and she has just recently written a novel. We learn that she’s married to a guy named Don, who’s a therapist and has his own insecurities about getting older.

He lets this out specifically with his patients, who he’s kind of disassociating with during the therapy process, making him probably a pretty bad therapist if you have him.

Anyways, things are about to go south between these two after Beth’s agent tells her that her novel needs a lot of edits, which she takes really badly. Don agrees to read her work, and he decides to tell her that she should look for a new agent, as he thinks the novel is fine.

However, not long after this, he tells Beth’s brother-in-law that he didn’t actually like the novel, but he doesn’t know Beth is listening. This crushes her, and Beth’s not really too sure about their steady relationship anymore.

The rest of the movie consists of Beth acting really weird and aggressive with Don, who’s already struggling with his own problems, as seen earlier when he’s with his patients. He has no idea what’s going on throughout all of this, and just thinks his wife is having a problem in general with life, but when at a birthday dinner, she spills and tells him that she knows he was lying.

Their son then gets in the middle of this and tells Beth she puts way too much pressure on Don, and then this pushes the two to have an honest conversation where they can talk about all of their problems, differences, and insecurities when it comes to each other.

Beth then has a realization that her response is a product of childhood trauma, and decides to get a new agent in the process of all of these brand new revelations.

At the end of the film, her novel is finally published. The two of them are still happily married, and Don decides to get eye surgery, with Beth encouraging him along the way.

Overall Thoughts

Although I was hooked into this movie originally by the plot talking about a writer facing insecurity with her own work, which is something I can relate to as a published writer myself, I didn’t feel end up liking this movie as much as I thought I would.

I get that I was coming into it with this expectation, when the movie is really about how these two people’s marriage is falling apart because of their inability to talk to each other about their emotions and inner dark feelings.

I can value these parts of the movie and the themes it’s introducing, but all in all I feel like that I walked away with feeling that this movie isn’t as impressionable to me, or memorable, as other films I’ve been watching as of late. And that’s fine. It’s fine if you like this film as well—taste is entirely subjective.

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