No Hard Feelings review – Jennifer Lawrence comedy plays sex work for laughs – The Guardian
Comedy, like intercourse work, is actual work and each can have a troublesome time gaining acceptance within the respectable world, so it’s a pleasure to discover a comedy about purchased intercourse that’s fairly humorous – and funnier than the pun within the title may recommend. Gene Stupnitsky co-wrote and directed the amusing bad-taste romp Good Boys, and now he provides us one other age-gap comedy a few very unsentimental training.
The scene is Montauk in New York state, famously the situation for TV sequence The Affair. Jennifer Lawrence performs Maddie, a girl in her early 30s who has been unfortunate in love, who nonetheless lives in her childhood dwelling, on their lonesome because the dying of her mom and never a lot concept about what to do together with her life. She scratches a dwelling as an Uber driver, however her automotive will get repossessed for non-payment of Montauk’s exorbitant property taxes on a home which she stubbornly received’t hire or promote to the smug vacationer incomers who’re pricing locals like her out of the neighbourhood.
Maddie’s finest associates, surfer-dude Jim (Scott MacArthur) and his pregnant companion Sara (Natalie Morales), level out an attention-grabbing opening marketed on Craigslist. A rich, painfully liberal couple, Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) are providing a free automotive to a girl who can “date” their intensely shy and virginal 19-year-old son, an excellent musician who’s going to Princeton within the fall; they’re scared that with out expertise, faculty goes to be simply too traumatic for him. Along with her regular sturdy frankness, Maddie interviews for the job and brusquely units out to seduce tremulous younger Percy, performed by Andrew Barth Feldman. She impatiently desires to get this whiny child’s cherry popped after which get the automotive. However after all it isn’t so simple as that.
This screenplay could effectively have been conceived earlier than Craigslist banned dodgy hook-up advertisements just a few years in the past, however the movie’s reluctance to make purchased intercourse something resembling a difficulty could be very up to date. It implies that there isn’t any comedian or dramatic traction from the association itself being supposedly improper, apart from the dad and mom’ sneakiness in not telling Percy that they had been behind it. It’s not aiming for transgressive or outrageous dangerous style – as in, say, the Stifler-mom scenes from American Pie a era in the past – nor any remaining emotional reckoning for Maddie who isn’t known as upon to remorse her Faustian discount.
The film cheerfully will get on with its high-concept premise, however this simply provides a slight sheen or glaze of unreality to the proceedings. Maddie and Percy’s relationship just isn’t as believable as that of Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, nonetheless studiedly weird that was. And for pure age-gap craziness, we are able to at all times search for Jennifer Lawrence’s legendary encounter with Jack Nicholson on Oscar night time in 2013.
However there are some nice scenes, mainly one wherein Maddie, stark bare, comes as much as some bullies on the seashore who’ve stolen her garments whereas she and Percy had been skinny dipping and proceeds to beat them up. There may be additionally Maddie’s generational dismay in crashing a high-school get together to confront Percy after an argument. It exhibits what a comedy flip Lawrence can nonetheless be.
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