Last week, Cameron Diaz told Jennifer Lawrence that she “was born to do R-rated comedies.” Diaz, who just came out of retirement to make a movie with Jamie Foxx and then promptly re-retired, welcomed Lawrence back to major motion pictures after what feels like half a decade away. She co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, but that was a Netflix movie that hardly had any theatrical release, one that was limited even further by the then-surging Omicron wave. But when was the last time I saw Jennifer Lawrence in a movie? Red Sparrow? Darren Aronofsky’s mother! was a mThe actress discusses her iconic role on Sex and the City at the 2014 Whistler Film Festival.ess, but it’s chilling to think how few completely insane and free films like play to packed multiplex matinees anymore.
Lawrence was everywhere for most of the 2010s, but she’s kept a low profile in the last five years. “We just need the laugh right now, because we’re living in a nightmare… Whatever I was feeling while making that movie, if that’s my sweet spot, then I don’t ever want to do anything else… I’ve always wanted to do comedy, and I’ve been asked a million times… I was never against it, but you’ve seen the movies that come out. I don’t want to name anything specifically, but there hasn’t been anything that funny.” I wonder what comedies she’s thinking of, in which direction: anti-Apatow? Didn’t like Ghostbusters with girls? I’d be surprised if she isn’t a fan of American Pie or Dude, Where’s My Car?, bawdy sex comedies that came out in our youth and clearly inspired her return to motion pictures, No Hard Feelings.
Directed by Gene Stupnitsky and co-written with John Phillips, No Hard Feelings follows Maddie (Lawrence) as she struggles to make payments on her dead mother’s house in Montauk. An old boyfriend (or hookup) shows up to repossess her car, leaving her unable to make any money driving for Uber. Scanning Craigslist, she finds a too-good-to-be-true curio from a rich summer couple desperate to get their nerdy and isolated son laid before he goes to Princeton in the fall. She goes to meet the parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) and there isn’t a catch, they’re truly deluded, “bulldozer parents” who are willing to pay their way out of difficult rites of life everyone goes through. Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is their poor alienated son, who meets Maddie “naturally,” so that the parents are never implicated.
Of course he finds out eventually his parents bought him a 32-year-old girlfriend (to be fair, they asked for 23), and of course everyone is playing a recognizable type—the dumb parents, the clueless boy, the ravenous girl, the quirky but loving side friends—but these are people and premises that have disappeared from popular American cinema in the last decade. If that’s what Lawrence was referring to, No Hard Feelings is a good sign, a movie that may be 15 to 20 minutes too long, but is still rooted in late-1990s/early-2000s American comedies, a language that I’ve really missed ever since Judd Apatow reared his ugly head. No Hard Feelings does try too hard, and some of it feels forced (particularly the topical material, like teenagers at a party trying to “cancel” Maddie by filming her out of context)—and anyone comparing the naked beach fight to the pie-fucking scene in American Pie is just as deluded as the parents in this movie.
The New York Post published a story on Monday about “backlash” the film’s received, but this article just feels like good promotion, and the people protesting “raunchy” premises like this—a 32-year-old woman is paid by the parents of a 19-year-old boy to fuck him—grow fewer and fewer every day. This isn’t anything more extreme than masterpieces like Zoolander; Monkeybone; Joe Dirt; Dude, Where’s My Car?; Little Nicky; Legally Blonde; Rat Race; or Freddy Got Fingered. What, you worry? People can handle this. In fact, I think audiences are desperate for more movies like this. Movies were made for slapstick violence and sex, but it has to come naturally, and for this genre to flourish, there need to be 10 movies like No Hard Feelings every year.
—Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith
