No Hard Feelings

When you both win the Academy Award for Best Actress and are voted the top money-making movie star in the entire industry before your 24th birthday, there isn’t a lot of room left for career advancement. That’s where Jennifer Lawrence found herself in 2013, as the face of Hollywood’s then-dominant YA franchise and also a widely respected actress with indie credibility (and the most prestigious accolade an actor can earn). Inevitably, The Hunger Games would end, with more of a loud whimper than a bang, and Lawrence’s likability Q-score would take a dive from the lofty perch of a “27 Positive.”

Instead of just enjoying her reported low nine-figure net worth and disappearing, Lawrence has endured. In the seven and a half years since her fourth and most recent Oscar nomination (for David O. Russell’s Joy), she fulfilled her obligations to the once exquisite but increasingly unfulfilling X-Men franchise and then looked to star in more adult-oriented films, including Darren Aronofsky’s academically admired but commercially disappointing mother! (2017) and Adam McKay’s widely recognized Netflix doomsday farce Don’t Look Up. Her most recent work, the A24 and AppleTV+ collaboration Causeway, forewent theatrical release but earned solid reviews.

This week, Lawrence embarks on perhaps the most daunting task in modern moviemaking, an R-rated studio comedy vehicle with a mid-level budget and no other star power to speak of. Since the pandemic, Hollywood has mostly done away with traditional theatrical releases for the kind of projects that were once a fixture in studio schedules. Netflix might embrace such fare, but the major studios, whose every release is subjected to publicly reported box office figures and inane kneejerk commentary online, understandably show more trepidation. The days of Judd Apatow movies opening at #1 and Vince Vaughn comedies selling tickets all summer long have passed and distributors’ faith does not extend much further than big budget, effects-heavy, branded spectacle, especially in the summertime.

But Sony, whose Columbia Pictures division scored big the first time they collaborated with Lawrence on 2013’s American Hustle and possibly just barely broke even on her 2016 sci-fi flick Passengers, is showing tremendous confidence in the longtime star and director/co-writer Gene Stupnitsky with this wide release. Judging from the modest attendance and fairly muted reaction at my advance screening, such confidence may not be warranted.

Lawrence plays against type as Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old drowning in bills. She has inherited her childhood home in the ritzy vacation hamlet of Montauk, Long Island, but rising property taxes have eclipsed her modest earnings as a bartender and Uber driver. In the film’s opening scene, Maddie’s car gets repossessed by a man she’s painfully ghosted after three months of dating. It seems Maddie has serious commitment issues to go along with her growing financial problems.

At a loss as to how to revive her Uber income without a car and save the family house, she encounters a Craigslist ad from a married couple of wealthy summer tourists (Matthew Broderick and Broadway’s Laura Benanti) offering a young woman in her early to mid 20s a Buick in exchange for dating their introverted, Princeton-bound son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). It’s an improbable concept that could only be a movie premise, but No Hard Feelings sells it well. As does Lawrence, who also serves as producer. There are about a hundred ways that a movie about a woman in her thirties inauthentically preying upon a sweet, virginal teenaged boy out of sheer desperation could go wrong. But Lawrence, as irresistible and spirited as ever, helps erase all the concerns we should have.

Alas, the script by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (Dirty Grandpa) hits its comedy marks far less often than their previous collaboration, 2019’s appealing, Phillips-produced, Stupnitsky-written/directed Good Boys. This plays a lot more like Stupnitsky’s second feature script, Bad Teacher, with which it shares some obvious DNA. It’s hard to believe that Lawrence, a leading lady upgrade from Cameron Diaz in every way imaginable, could somehow end up in a far less entertaining version of Bad Teacher, but that’s what happens. It’s a direct product of a screenplay that writes itself into a corner and struggles to sort out its issues.

There is no doubt that Stupnitsky and Phillips are inspired by comedy movies from their 1980s childhoods, films like Risky Business and Can’t Buy Me Love. That’s a foundation with potential, giving this project some intrigue over the narrowly Gen Z-oriented competition. And Lawrence is as good here as the writing allows her to be, already embracing at 32 an abrasive adult role that actors like Diaz and Charlize Theron in Young Adult waited until their late 30s to play. A Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical nomination from the Golden Globes is not out of the question, albeit out of the conversation.

But despite the best efforts and intentions, No Hard Feelings mostly falls flat. Feldman’s character is too passive and unbelievably damaged for us to buy into Maddie’s warped, secretly-for-hire relationship with him on any level. Supporting characters — including Natalie Morales (“Parks & Rec”) as Maddie’s bestie and SNL‘s Kyle Mooney as Percy’s childhood nanny Jody — appear only to redirect the plot, not to comment or challenge the preposterous conceits. It’s always clear you’re watching a calculated mainstream comedy and one that never stops testing and falling short of your suspension of disbelief. Scenes that ring the falsest include Percy captivating a busy restaurant with an impromptu piano and vocal interpretation of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” and a bunch of teenagers acting like Lawrence, inexplicably stunning despite shooting this six months after giving birth to her first child, is old and out of touch among them.

Maybe I’m just being subjected to the wrong celebrity gossip, but Lawrence’s fully nude scene here — in which she violently stands up to some moonlit beach bullies — qualifies as a shocking inclusion, even in an outrageous comedy, which like Stupnitsky’s previous one, is being marketed with red band trailers. Still, that seems unlikely to move the needle on a movie that experts are anticipating to debut with a modest $10 million opening weekend one week after both DC’s The Flash and Pixar’s Elemental fell short of expectations.

There ought to be a market for human comedies standing as counterprogramming to bombastic summer tentpoles, but based on recent trends, the prospect of a Step Brothers or Wedding Crashers-sized adult hit emerging over the next two months sounds just as far-fetched as the entire plot of No Hard Feelings.