VOD film review: No Hard Feelings
Review Overview
Cast
8Comedy
7Comfort levels
6David Farnor | On 12, Nov 2023
Director: Gene Stupnitsky
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Feldman, Matthew Broderick
Certificate: 15
Boy meets girl. Girl charms boy. Girl is given a car by boys’ parents. To say that’s not the usual format for a romantic comedy goes without saying, but No Hard Feelings is the kind of film that succeeds precisely because it’s breaking the rules and it knows it.
Jennifer Lawrence stars as Maddie, a 32-year-old Uber dribe in Montauk, who is on the brink of bankruptcy and losing her home – a house that she inherited from her mum. Worried about being pushed out of her home town and neighbourhood by a younger, wealthier generation, she takes the desperate move of replying to a Craigslist ad. The job? Dating a 19-year-old called Percy (Andrew Feldman) and receiving a Buick in return from his parents, who are worried he’s too shy to survive when he goes to Princeton University later that year.
The age gap alone is enough to catch your attention, but the script – by Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips – makes the smart decision not to brush past it, but to focus on it intently. The result is a deliberately awkward and uncomfortable attempt at matchmaking, one that’s instigated by misguided parents, attempted by a seriously flawed individual, and goes wrong at every turn. But the more that Maddie tries to get her hands on that car, the more she learns from her naive would-be boyfriend that she might not be the mature one of the two after all.
That much is obvious from the off, thanks to Jennifer Lawrence brilliantly committed performance. Clearly revelling in the opportunity to show off her comic timing, she’s a bundle of slapstick laughs, whether she’s failing to rollerskate or fighting on the beach with so much childish rage that she doesn’t think about whether she’s wearing any clothes. Crucially, she also sells the dramatic side of the whole affair, from timely concerns about gentrification to learning to think about other people – she’s one of the most entertainingly flawed female characters to hit our screens since Charlize Theron in Young Adult.
Equally crucial to the film’s success is that Andrew Feldman is also fantastic. He nails the anxiety of an overly coddled youngster, while also being capable of surprising with confident outbursts – including one standout moment involving a piano. Together, he and Lawrence are charming to watch not as a romantic couple, but as two people who grow as a result of their exceedingly unlikely friendship. Throw in a hilarious, scene-stealing Matthew Broderick as Percy’s dad and you have a comedy that’s knowingly inappropriate, amusingly raunchy and just conventional enough to know when to swap one genre’s rules for another. That it serves as a reminder of Jennifer Lawrence’s comedic chops is a welcome bonus.