JLaw Returns With A Raunchy Comedy

Comic Timing

Jennifer Lawrence leverages her natural gift for physical comedy in No Hard Feelings. Prahlad Srihari writes.

NO longer than a decade ago, it seemed like Jennifer Lawrence could not put a foot wrong. Save for the half a dozen times she stumbled on the grandest of stages and the reddest of carpets. As a promising actor itching to build a multidimensional body of work, she was as surefooted as they come. Between late-night talk-show confessions about butt plugs and crushing on Larry David, she disarmed everyone with her overshares and refreshing candour. There was an inherent affability, a BFF-ability even, to her sense of humour that endeared her to the world. Lawrence became a star not in spite of her tendency to fall flat on her face, but because of it. Which is why it is astonishing that Hollywood did not leverage her self-deprecating charms and her natural gift for physical comedy.

RAUNCHY RETURN

Jennifer Lawrence Saves 'No Hard Feelings', A Flaccid Entry In A Hallowed Tradition

By Prahlad Srihari

On becoming a producer herself, Lawrence channels exactly those, casting caution to the wind in No Hard Feelings. In the throes of helping a gawky teen come out of his shell, Lawrence as thirty-something Maddie roller-skates up a flight of stairs, wrestles in the nude, and gets pepper-sprayed in the face, punched in the throat and barbecued in the ass. We see a truly committed practitioner of the slapstick arts attempt to energise every kind of hijinks with whip-crack comic timing and a go-for-broke moxie. Lawrence digs into her toolkit to elicit humour from discomfort, insecurity and desperation in a powerhouse showcase that proves she has lost no star wattage despite a three-year break. Only if the powerhouse showcase could have been airlifted out of this impotent comedy and grafted onto a vehicle worthy of her talents.

For the longer you watch No Hard Feelings, the more nagging the feeling becomes that director Gene Stupnitsky may have reverse-engineered the story and all its gags from the double meaning of the title. Pay no regard to those hyping it up as the return of the raunchy comedy. This is a flaccid entry in a hallowed tradition. There’s next to nothing to get hot and bothered. Not over an R-rated comedy for our PG times. Not over a movie without any edge to take aim at an online generation that seems to have internalised censorship in a moral panic.

Seeing as Maddie getting repeatedly hurt is played for more laughs than the painful embarrassments of growing up, only shows how our culture — even before its recent regression to puritanism — has always been a lot more comfortable with violence than with sex. Movies about teenage boys with unruly libidos treating girls as trophies and consent as an easily navigable obstacle in the race for sex were once a staple in the release calendar. It took a while for mainstream cinema to course-correct. When it did, girls were finally embraced as equal-ops participants in sexually charged coming-of-age shenanigans. Today, four-quadrant tentpoles have all but pushed out the mid-budget sex comedy — sneaking into which was a formative milestone for so many teenagers.

When it comes to such movies, shallowness can be its own depth as they capture the desperation of horniness with honesty, and without losing humour. But the humour cannot rely entirely upon snowballing vulgarities and gags as if they were subversive moments in themselves, as No Hard Feelings tends to do. A lack of a strong directorial signature and punctuation robs the movie of critical heft and any guilty pleasures. The script by Stupnitsky and his co-writer John Phillips hop-scotches between the awkwardness of an age-imbalanced rom-com, the farce of its absurd situationship, and the winsome sentiment of a shared journey towards self-discovery. The problem is it draws almost all of its mileage out of Lawrence’s ability to drive in and out of all these tonal lanes. She may give it her all, but it isn’t enough when she has been given so little.

Gentrification and the gig economy have made it hard for Maddie to stay afloat. Working as a bartender and Uber driver in Long Island cannot pay for the surging property taxes on her childhood home. She is barely scraping by as it is. When her car is repossessed, she roller-skates up the hill for a job interview — which speaks to the challenges of upward mobility in this tough economy. So, when she sees a Craigslist ad from a wealthy couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) looking for someone to date their 19-year-old virgin son before he is off to Princeton, she readily accepts. The son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), is the kind of anxious, shy, naive shut-in with no friends or dating prospects — who might have been played far more convincingly by the likes of Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg in the mid-2000s. Constant mollycoddling by mom and dad has brought the young man’s psychosexual development to a complete halt, so much so that he breaks out in hives at any sign of intimacy. Hiring Maddie to “date his brains out”, the parents believe, will get him up to speed on the requisite developmental landmarks before college.

Sporting a form-fitting pink dress and high heels, Maddie initially comes on so strong Percy thinks he is being kidnapped. The clash of personalities, as Maddie attempts to seduce Percy and he rebuffs her, supplies the grist for comedy. In Maddie, we have an emotionally closed-off millennial baffled by a teenage boy not interested in casual sex but a deeper connection. In Percy, we have a blue-nosed Gen-Zer who is scared to drink, drive or get laid. The resultant mayhem funnels into a calculably wholesome ending bookended by kindred understanding i.e., over fears of growing up, becoming attached and getting out of comfort zones.

Look hard enough: there are serious concerns bubbling just beneath the silly. How helicopter parenting can end up keeping adolescents in a state of arrested development. How age is the new class. How income inequality shapes power dynamics. Generations clash when Maddie crashes a Gen Z party, where she is ma’am-ed and told off by virtue-signallers, armed with phones in hand, ready to film any slip-up from their moral high ground. But the movie pulls out prematurely before it can make any sort of a point. Which would have barely been an issue if the antics and zingers were funny enough to keep the movie cracking along. They aren’t. No matter the efforts of a cast led by Lawrence and Feldman who make for an elastic pair. The latter’s inability to match comic instincts beat for beat with the former, somehow plays into their peculiar chemistry. But there is no denying No Hard Feelings is Lawrence’s movie through and through. The J-hook of a tow truck that opens the movie spells out exactly whose vehicle this is. She pulls out all the stops, flexing both her dramatic and comedic chops, to play a woman confronting a lifetime of avoidant attachment and getting to the root of it. Only, she has been saddled in a comedy that is cinematic prophylactic — and it is unlikely to get anyone off.

No Hard Feelings is currently playing in theatres.

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