‘No Hard Feelings’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence’s Semi-Rom-Com Flirts With Risky Business but Plays It Safe – Variety
In recent times, because the romantic comedy has executed a gradual fade-out from the large display screen, it typically appears to have taken intercourse proper together with it. Possibly that accounts for the extraordinary curiosity sparked by the trailer for — and media protection of — “No Onerous Emotions,” a kind of romantic comedy a couple of 32-year-old out-of-work Uber driver, performed by Jennifer Lawrence, who will get concerned with a gawky 19-year-old virgin geek who’s about to enter Princeton. There’s been some moralistic pearl-clutching over the trailer, although most likely for the exact same purpose that the film might join: It appears to be like slightly pervy. But once you see “No Onerous Emotions,” you notice that the movie’s promise of dangerous enterprise is little greater than an enormous tease.
Lawrence’s Maddie is an underachiever who grew up in Montauk, the picturesque sea village on the tip of Lengthy Island, and by no means left. An unapologetic and at instances combative hedonist, with a sample of relationship males for a number of months solely to ghost them, she lives in the home she inherited from her mom. It’s all paid off, however she’s going to lose the place except she will sustain with the escalating property taxes — and to try this she wants her Uber job, which goes to be an issue, since her automobile simply bought repossessed (with considered one of her exes, performed by “The Bear’s” Ebon Moss-Bachrach, doing the towing).
Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is the aforementioned 19-year-old, whose rich dad and mom (Matthew Broderick, smug in lengthy grey boomer hair, and Laura Benanti) have a summer season dwelling in Montauk, and it appears they’ve devoted their lives to overprotecting him. They’re helicopter perfectionists who monitor his each transfer, have the passcode to his cellphone, and have made certain that his complete existence exemplifies the safe-space era. The consequence? Percy is a morose loner with no mates, who doesn’t drive or drink or do something enjoyable, and is on the brink of ship off to school as a monkish arrested-development case.
So his determined people place an advert. They’re in search of a girl in her early-to-mid-20s who can hang around with Percy, go on dates with him, and take his virginity. They see all of it as school prep. For the reason that reward they’re providing for popping Percy’s cherry is a Buick Regal, the state of affairs strains up reasonably completely with Maddie’s want for a automobile. True, she’s slightly older than the lady they’re in search of, however in accordance with the movie’s logic that simply makes her a extra realizing erotic tutor.
As an actor, Jennifer Lawrence radiates pleasure, sensuality, and a glowing perception in herself, and I didn’t purchase for a second that her Maddie would signal on to sleeping with some child all to achieve entry to a automobile, in order that she might rejoin the gig economic system, as a result of in any other case her beloved home will go poof! However watching “No Onerous Emotions,” you kind of roll with it, as a result of the director and co-screenwriter, Gene Stupnisky (“Good Boys”), works with a confectionary talent that tugs you alongside, as a result of in spirit it’s only a rom-com (a type not meant to go the plausibility check), and since Lawrence, performing with a brazen theatrical sexiness that permits her to wink on the viewers at how adeptly she will flip it on and off, and newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman, who’s like Mike White crossed with the pale son of Seth Meyers crossed with an amoeba, seems to be a successful actor.
The 2 characters meet when Maddie, faking all the pieces she says, stops into the animal shelter the place Percy is working as a volunteer. She’s carrying a skin-tight raspberry mini-dress and strappy gold platform heels, and her each line about adopting a canine is an aggressive double entendre. The joke is that all of it falls on deaf ears; Percy doesn’t look like a child with an internal canine. Actually, “No Onerous Emotions” does such a very good job of building that Maggie’s sex-bomb exhibitionism is all theater, executed from pure opportunism, and that Percy has no hormonal response to it, that the movie successfully defangs any attainable romantic or erotic hazard from both facet. It’s like “Dangerous Enterprise” restaged as low-risk administration.
For some time, Maddie tries to goad Percy into discovering his internal wild boy. At a bar, she orders him a Lengthy Island Ice Tea (which he thinks tastes like unhealthy ice tea), and on the seaside she coerces him right into a nude midnight ocean swim, an journey lower brief when some impolite children resolve to steal their garments. The scene that follows, during which Maddie runs out of the ocean and engages them in bodily fight, all whereas she herself stays completely full-frontal bare, performs as a bizarre piece of exploitation. It was utterly pointless to movie Lawrence in that means, other than somebody’s calculation about how a lot it will add to the movie’s box-office take. However to reveal that the film is practising equal-opportunity nudity, Percy winds up bare on the hood of a rushing automobile, in a scene that looks like it will kill to be happening in a junk teen comedy of the ’80s.
Right here’s the distinction. “No Onerous Emotions” is the primary Hollywood comedy about a youngster dropping his virginity during which {the teenager} in query has no obvious want to lose his virginity. So the place does that depart Maddie and Percy? Their relationship will not be, in any possible way, sexual (although they do have one temporary encounter), and even romantic. However Percy blossoms underneath her gaze, and for some time that’s compelling, particularly once you don’t know the place the film goes. When Percy comes out of his shell sufficient to sit down down on the piano in a elaborate restaurant and serenade the patrons with a cocktail-lounge rendition of Corridor and Oates’ “Manhunter,” or when Maddie crashes a celebration of Princeton preppies, solely to find that she’s even older than she thinks she is, the film generates a little bit of frisson.
Someway, although, it doesn’t come to a lot. The script of “No Onerous Emotions” creates its personal protected house, designed to do little greater than let Maddie and Percy type a friendship during which they Assist Every Different Develop. Jokes about finger traps, the spraying of mace, and a canine that likes cocaine are all much less humorous than examples of the film making an attempt too onerous. Lawrence is looser and extra rambunctious than she’s been in any movie since “American Hustle,” and Feldman by no means appears lower than an genuine 19-year-old. This younger actor has presence, and an earnestness that makes it really feel like he’s past fakery. However that works for the film and towards it. For all its handwringing about Era Protected, “No Onerous Emotions” presents Percy as a naïve and anxious however mainly peculiar teenager who doesn’t actually need to do something however develop up on his personal phrases. It’s the movie that’s making an attempt to whoosh him ahead. On some stage it desires him to be as concocted because the state of affairs during which he finds himself.
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