‘No Hard Feelings’ Lets Jennifer Lawrence Get Raunchy
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Jennifer Lawrence is hilarious. Sure, she made her name as an actor in dead-serious indie dramas (The Burning Plain, Winter’s Bone), franchise tent poles (The Hunger Games trilogy, those X-Men 2.0 blockbusters), the kind of nerve-shredding films that fall somewhere between horror and thriller (House at the End of the Street, Passengers), and whatever category you care to slot Mother! into. Filmmaker David O. Russell figured out early on that Lawrence was a perfect fit for his skewed, neurotic dramedies, and it’s impossible to think that Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle would have worked as well as they did without her. After taking a break and becoming a mom, the Oscar winner came back and gave us Causeway, which proved she was still willing to go deep and dark. Complicated women were always her forte, even when she was painted blue.
But if you watched Lawrence in her talk-show appearances or caught her red-carpet shenanigans, you knew that the Kentucky native was funny. Like, unpredictably, uncontrollably WTF funny. She’s capable of bringing a chaos-energy A-game that made you think this movie star was the second coming of Carole Lombard, someone whose beauty was not undercut but complemented by a truly wicked sense of humor. No one, not even Russell, had really tapped in to that part of her public persona; when she did get a role in a “comedy” like Don’t Look Up, Lawrence was reduced to being the ranting voice of reason among a sea of loons. (We’re putting the descriptive in quotes, since a comedy must be funny by definition, and judging by that standard, we’re still not sure whether the movie qualifies.)
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So, when a red-band trailer dropped several months back that suggested some creative types had finally figured out how to harness Lawrence’s raging id and comic chops, all for a premise that tested the boundaries of “good taste,” interests were piqued. We were finally going to get the real-deal, no-filter J-Law that she’d professed to taming in the name of maturity, up on the screen in full foul-mouthed bloom. This would be a riot worthy of a stealth raunch-com queen. Right? Right?!
No such luck. No Hard Feelings does give Lawrence the chance to behave abhorrently and anti-socially against a sea of blue-blood d-bags, the winning slob facing down a world of snobs one “fuck off” at a time. It goes without saying that she’s the best thing about this stapled-together attempt at an R-rated sex comedy, in the same way that a daisy looks a lot better than the pile of dung it’s growing out of. Her timing, her way of lacing a clapback with weapons-grade snark, her extraordinary deftness with physical comedy — give her a staircase to walk up while wearing Rollerblades, a shelf to pull down after she’s been punched in the throat, or an entitled jerk to rip into, and Lawrence will deliver the goods. Not even J-Law off the nice-young-lady leash can save something this lazy and desperate to offend, however. The movie simply isn’t on her level. Or really much of any level at all.
Her character, Maddie Barker, is a Montauk, New York, local with a well-earned reputation as a wreaker of havoc. She’s hooked up with most of the guys in town and then immediately ghosted them; the list of those who wish her ill is miles long. The rage directed at her is matched only by the resentment she harbors for all these rich folks who’ve recently moved in, treat the townies like servants, and caused the property taxes on her late mom’s house to go through the roof — which she now can’t pay because she just lost her car, effectively killing her Uber-driving gig.
That’s why Maddie answers a Craigslist ad from a local couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) about their Buick. They don’t want money, however. In exchange for the automobile, these concerned parents would like the thirtysomething Maddie to date their 19-year-old son, Percy (newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman). As in, to use Maddie’s phrase, “date-date” him. The kid’s smart but shy, talented but too afraid of his own shadow. He’s going to college in the fall, and his folks want to boost his self-confidence. How better to do that than have the kid be seduced by an older woman?
Right now, you’re either recoiling from or leaning into this morally queasy setup that would be called “smutty” in the Sixties, “risque” in the Seventies, and Risky Business-lite in the Eighties. (You can see bits of that early Tom Cruise movie, along with a pinch of The Graduate, in the idea of a young guy getting initiated into an adulthood characterized by sex, capitalism, and crassness.) What No Hard Feelings is really going for is the ha-ha-meets-awww combination that the Farrelly brothers perfected, especially once the movie decides it wants you to care about these characters. Maddie starts to take a shine to this kid. He, in turn, gets her to open up about her father issues when she’s not trying to mount him or isn’t getting kicked in her groin. You can feel the movie straining to hit the belly-laugh high notes while also strumming your heartstrings, yet it just sort of clumsily stumbles from one tone to the next. Say what you will about the Farrellys — they understood how to get the correct sweet-and-sour combination for a gross-out comedy. This movie just feels sour.
It’s also trying to evoke the decade-old wave of women-behaving-badly comedy that peaked with Bridesmaids and hit its nadir with Bad Teacher. Not surprisingly, director and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky wrote that Cameron Diaz movie, which gave us a similar gloriously degenerate heroine who eventually mellows out, matures, etc. He worked on The Office as well, though whatever tips he picked up about comedy there aren’t getting used here. Scenes seem to end just as they’re starting to gain some kind of comic momentum, and there’s no rhythm to any of the bits that should be absolutely slaying thanks to Lawrence’s talents. Side characters show up for a nanosecond, then fade from the film’s memory. (Hasan Minhaj, Kyle Mooney, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are all owed apologies.) Even the big, broad swings sort of whiff. Did we mention that Lawrence is butt-naked and beating the crap out of thieves on a beach when she catches a foot in her genitals? This is the sort of centerpiece designed to have audiences howling, and probably killed on the page. The way the sequence is presented, it’s like you’re witnessing it die a sudden death on the screen.
The longer you watch No Hard Feelings’ comedic sure things inevitably turning into misfires, the more cynical and angry you’ll find yourself becoming. Lawrence is bringing so much to the table, working double time to make the double-entendre dialogue work and make this screw-up worthy of sympathy — not to mention throwing herself into the slapstick routines and Maddie’s sexiness-fails with gusto — that you want the movie to support her performance, instead of the other way around. The best way to eventually see her work here may be via YouTube, when the inspired moments of gonzo lunacy and wide-eyed reaction shots will stand alone as quick blips of funny business and stand apart from the film they’re trapped in. The future of hard-R raunch-coms from studios, not to mention ones that get theatrical releases, depends on stars like Lawrence doing exactly what she’s doing to prop this thing up. It’s hard not to feel like this attempt to resurrect the genre is undermining that future altogether.
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