Alright yes, the new comedy No Hard Feelings, from Gene Stupnitsky, the director and co-writer of the equally raunchy Good Boys, is about a 30-something-year-old woman who agrees to “date” the 19-year-old son of well-to-do parents while the family is vacationing at their summer home in Montauk, Long Island. Two-time Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie, who seems addicted to bad decisions, such as noncommittal dating and low-paying jobs that barely make it possible for her to pay her property taxes on time. But the aforementioned parents (played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, both Tony winners) offer Maddie a free car in exchange for not just dating their socially awkward son Percy (newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman) but also bringing him out of his shell before he heads to Princeton in the fall.
As the film progresses, we start to realize that there’s a bit more to this film than just an R-rated sex comedy. Not unlike Kevin Smith’s Zack & Miri Make a Porno, No Hard Feelings acknowledges that a sizable portion of Americans are financially struggling. The only reason Maddie even contemplates this arrangement is that she’s about to lose the house that her mother willed to her when she died. When she can’t make the tax payment, the government repossesses her car, which is a problem because she’s an Uber driver and it’s about to be the busy season in Montauk. But the film goes deeper into the class structure in the community. Maddie is a local, and she resents the rich folks that come into Montauk, drive up real estate values, and thus her taxes. Her mother had an affair with one of these rich (married) men, and Maddie was the result, so technically Maddie has a rich father but one that she’s never met and who wants nothing to do with her. The deeper we get into Maddie’s backstory, the more focused and better the movie gets.
Although Percy is initially painted as a lonely nerd, again, the deeper we get into his state of mind, the more we realize that a lifetime of bullying in school has driven him inside himself. His closest friends are all online or the animals he takes care of at the local animal shelter. He’s a sweetheart of a kid but he’s in danger of having the world eat him alive once he leaves the confines of home and his parents, who track his whereabouts via his phone and have raised him to be a strict rule-follower. Feldman’s take on Percy isn’t the stereotypical geek; he’s a desperately lonely kid with few social skills. So when an actual woman with some amount of experience tells him he’s hot, his confidence levels begin to increase but his core values don’t really change.
When Maddie indicates she wants to have sex with him, he’s happy about that but he doesn’t see how you could sleep with someone without knowing or caring about them first, which is the polar opposite of how Maddie has lived her life to this point. So what she thought was going to be a day-long seduce-and-conquer event turns into the two of them dating for a short time and actually forming a connection that she starts to feel protective of. Naturally, by the time Percy is ready for sex, he’s fully in love with Maddie and even considering not going to college to keep the relationship going. That, coupled with the fact that we know her arrangement with his parents is going to be exposed, adds a bit of dramatic tension to the whole affair.
The bottom line is, the film is funny, predictable in places, and front-loaded with an incredible supporting cast, including Natalie Morales as Maddie’s pregnant best friend Sara and her idiot partner Jim (Scott MacArthur), who are considering leaving the area because they can’t afford to buy a house. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is Maddie’s ex, who also happens to be the local tow truck operator who takes her car at the beginning of the film; Hasan Minhaj is Maddie’s old high school classmate and current real estate agent, who really wants to help her sell her house; and Kyle Mooney is Percy’s overly protective former nanny, which sets up so many very funny moments between him and Maddie, whom he suspects of being a gold-digger.
But the real reason the film (co-written by the director and John Phillips) works so well is that Lawrence is fully committed to this wholly inappropriate premise. To Maddie, there is nothing precious or sacred or even that special about sex or sleeping with someone. When one guy apologizes in advance of sex for having to clear out early the next morning, she says “Do you have to wait that long?” She rejects being referred to as a sex worker by Percy’s parents, but she also brings a certain amount of dignity to the profession by never allowing anyone to make her feel like her attitudes about sex are problematic. She has agency over her body and life, and if sleeping with a 19 year old saves her family home, she dares anyone to have a problem with that.
But Maddie also has abandonment issues (which I wish had been explored a tiny bit more) and anger-management problems (a scene on the beach in which people steal her clothes when she’s skinny dipping with Percy is terrifying, hilarious, and a bit shocking), all of which just makes her more realistic and fully realized as a character. No Hard Feelings has more heart and relatability than just about any other film I’ve seen from a Hollywood studio so far this year; it also has more laughs per minute than most of them as well, and it’s great to see Lawrence cut loose and essentially not give a damn who she might offend or make uncomfortable.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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