The foremost joy of “No Hard Feelings,” a movie that evokes the raunchy, modestly budgeted, and unfortunately pretty extinct comedies of the late-aughts and early 2010s, comes from the sense that its star, Jennifer Lawrence, is having fun. Lawrence is a classical-sense movie star whose public persona tends to radiate a good time — it’s all the goofball irreverence, the charmingly chaotic media appearances — while largely never starring in projects that let her play that up. The only movie that’s really come close was 2013’s “American Hustle,” though the then-22-year-old was so gravely miscast as a kooky housewife with an even kookier updo that you mostly were struck by her utter wrongness for the part.
“No Hard Feelings” isn’t that great; it only stokes the argument that most movies don’t quite know how to fully harness what makes Lawrence so magnetic off-screen. (She’s a successor to Sandra Bullock in that way.) But it still hits the spot you want hit when you’re going to the movies expressly to see a comedy with some edge. And it hosts some of Lawrence’s best work yet — the kind that makes you hope she trains her attention on comedy rather than the mostly austere stuff to which she’s always been a little more drawn for the next few years.
In “No Hard Feelings,” Lawrence plays a financially desperate woman, Maddie, coaxed into a situation doomed to probably not end well because it has an offer she doesn’t feel like she can refuse attached to it. She’s living in Montauk, in the house she inherited from her mother, barely making ends meet by tending bar and Uber driving amid hiking-up property taxes thanks to the recent local influx of 1 percenters. At the beginning of the movie, her car is repossessed because of her lack of payments on said property taxes — something that puts her in a bind, obviously, because you can’t make Uber money and can’t get to the dockside cabana to unhappily mix cocktails for entitled visitors without a car.
Scanning Craigslist for a vehicle in her price range that also is in miraculous good shape, she happens upon a listing that she’d just laugh at in a different, more financially stable life. Some local parents (Laura Benanti and Benjamin Franklin-wigged Matthew Broderick), so rich that you have to yell into an intercom for them to even consider opening the gate to their sleek mansion, are offering a Buick Regal. The catch: the party interested must be an attractive woman in her late teens or early 20s because she must also successfully — and, of course, without spilling her motives — bring their reclusive 19-year-old son Percy (a very well-cast Andrew Barth Feldman) out of his shell by “dating” him before he heads off to Princeton in the fall. Maddie is a little older than preferred; she’s so hesitant to say she’s 32 that she starts by roundaboutly going with the lie that she turned 29 last year. But since there have been no biters on the ad, and since it’s unlikely Percy would resist advances coming from someone who looks like her (“No Hard Feelings” reminds you how rarely Lawrence’s movies underline her beauty), she’s hired.
Maddie is initially aggressively flirtatious in a way that calls to mind a cartoon bombshell. When she first meets Percy, dressed in a clinging hot-pink dress and peacocking in impractically high heels, at the animal shelter where he volunteers, she asks to touch the Daschund he’s holding, only she doesn’t say Daschund. The come-ons to follow have such an opposite effect than their intended one that Percy ends up macing his would-be suitor, thinking he’s about to become a kidnapping victim.
But “No Hard Feelings,” a little like 2021’s “Licorice Pizza” if some of the ambient creepiness were filtered, will soon see those early missteps give way to an actual connection. It’s unrequitedly romantic for Percy (he’ll at one point declare that he won’t be going to Princeton anymore, since Maddie doesn’t want to go long distance); for Maddie, it’s almost maternal. She encourages Percy, a talented-but-reserved musician, to play for the crowd at a swanky restaurant with an empty grand piano; she’s openly defensive when a girl of about Percy’s age, who seems nice and like she genuinely likes him, invites him to a party. (Percy was bullied so severely and apparently universally in school that his parents got the main perpetrator expelled.)
Lawrence seems up for anything in “No Hard Feelings.” In one scene, she beats up, in the buff, a group of rude teens who attempt to steal her and her date’s clothes while they go skinny dipping; in another, her body becomes a kind of personified tornado after her character accidentally gets punched in the throat, flailing around the room and knocking stuff over like it’s the only way to stave off what feels like fast-approaching death. Lawrence has a thus-far untapped yen for physical comedy, it turns out; at her best, she’s like an earthier Jim Carrey. (She has him beat on nicely timed deadpan line deliveries, though.) She also gives the emotional beats a resonance a lesser actress might accidentally render contrived in a film that requires so much of the acting to be so forwardly silly. Lawrence is unquestionably why you walk out of the movie telling the people you came with that you enjoyed it as much as you did. Such is the power of a movie star, who elevates a film into something more worthwhile than it otherwise would be simply by being in it.
“No Hard Feelings” doesn’t try to force an odd-couple May-December romance; instead it homes in on the warm-fuzzy positives that will come out of an arrangement that otherwise is a terrible idea. Percy gets new confidence; Maddie gets a new perspective on her life, made to rethink whether it’s worth going to all this trouble to save a house in a city that no longer brings her the joy it once did. Lawrence is great in the early scenes where she’s awkwardly trying to get Percy to like her, but she might be even better during the concluding stretch of the movie, when she’s deep in existential reconsideration. “No Hard Feelings” has a goofy premise, but it also has a good amount of heart played effectively. I laughed a little less than I expected, but I cared about the characters in a way I didn’t anticipate.
SOME THINGS CAN ALMOST ALWAYS BE GUARANTEED. In the case of a Wes Anderson movie, you can always count on everything looking amazing — his beautifully composed tableaux give even the banalest of sequences the artfulness of a series of paintings — without being that confident that the film will be as adept at thrilling your eyes as stirring something in your soul. Anderson isn’t incapable of making a genuinely emotional movie; 2001’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” and 2014’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” are among the projects that immediately come to mind. But sometimes what he turns in struggles to incite much of an emotional reaction. You don’t doubt Anderson’s sincerity, but his movies regularly transmit such a potent sense of unyielding control that they become an unreliable venue for arousing the abstract caprices of human feeling.
His latest movie, “Asteroid City,” is his best since “Budapest.” Ushering us into the narrative with a framing device that cleverly complements Anderson’s own hankering for careful staging, it circles around the events of and the people participating in and around a Junior Stargazer convention in 1955 in the eponymous city. Unlike Anderson’s previous couple movies, 2021’s “The French Dispatch” and 2018’s “Isle of Dogs,” his characters and the situations in which they find themselves don’t as much feel kept at arm’s length. You’re often struck by its sense of intimacy, something more easily fostered when the town in which most of the action is set has a population of only 87 and therefore needn’t have distinguishing names for its one motel, its one gas station, or its one diner, which is really more of a lunch counter.
But the overwhelming meticulousness of the gorgeous visuals still can feel a little stifling. “Asteroid City” often hits you the same way a singer belting from the depths of their soul while their voice is filtered with cranked-up autotune would. There’s no mistaking the feeling there, but the effects imposed on them restrain the full extent of their power. That doesn’t apply, though, to lead actress Scarlett Johansson. Styled, a little, like if Elizabeth Taylor was approachable to play the famous-actress mother of one of the kid participants (Grace Edwards) of the convention, she gives one of her best performances as a woman damaged by a bad history with men and restless with professional dissatisfaction. Johansson’s performance partially strikes you as good as it does because her characterological pathos doesn’t feel squashed by Anderson’s manicured constraints. She’s the one character in the movie that seems close to real.
This column originally appeared in 425 magazine.
Peterson Reviews 