Formerly Known As Cinema

It hardly needs to be said that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has had quite an accomplished television career. According to Wikipedia, she has appeared on

60 episodes of “Saturday Night Live” (3 as host),
33 episodes of “Day by Day”,
177 episodes of “Seinfeld”,
8 episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”,
3 episodes of “The Simpsons”,
19 episodes of “Watching Ellie”,
4 episodes of “Arrested Development”,
88 episodes of “The New Adventures of Old Christine”, and
65 episodes of “Veep”.

Additionally, she has received

9 Golden Globe nominations and 1 win,
21 Screen Actors Guild Awards and 9 wins, and
26 Emmy Award nominations and 11 wins.

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For over forty years, Louis-Dreyfus has specialized in playing a delightful variety of buoyant, endearing smart alecks with a penchant for foolish behavior — e.g. Elaine’s painfully unhip dance moves on an infamous “Seinfeld” episode — and energized by a preternatural, almost elvish gleam in her eyes that brings the promise of fun or mischief or both.

This quality, so specific it’s almost a brand, has essentially defined her as an actor. And, frankly, the idea of Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing a character who doesn’t possess an excess of pert charm is kind of unimaginable.

And yet in Nicole Holofcener’s new film, “You Hurt My Feelings”, Louis-Dreyfus has been cast as a drab, insecure and somewhat mopey writer with apparently no sense of humor and a marked inability to express her emotions.

It’s a huge risk to ask a highly incandescent performer to, in effect, dampen their candle power down to the wattage of a small appliance bulb. But Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus have done exactly that.

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In some cases actors known primarily for a particular kind of comedy have found it difficult to stretch beyond familiar territory.

Kristen Wiig, for instance, when called upon to dig deep or show sincerity — as she was in 2013’s lamentably bad Alice Munro adaptation “Hateship, Loveship” — has invariably stumbled in her attempts to turn the trick of reinvention: When you’ve specialized in irony and sarcasm, it’s a tough sell to convincingly impart heartfelt truth.

Molly Shannon (”SNL”) and Melissa McCarthy (”Mike & Molly”), on the other hand, have managed to affectively widen their range. Shannon was both warmly funny and heartbreaking as a mom dying of cancer in 2016’s “Other People” and McCarthy was brilliantly acerbic as literary forger Lee Israel in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

The key for an actor attempting this daunting transformation is to find something compelling to replace those tried and true features we’ve come to love and expect.

But Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t seem to have any other tricks in her bag to fill in for the easy charm, sass and glib sense of play that she withholds from us here, leaving a vacuum of personality onscreen.

It doesn’t help that Holofcener’s apparent default as a writer/director is inoffensively pleasant. For a movie with the word ‘Hurt’ in the title, there’s almost no real emotional bruising involved anywhere in the film.

And yet the set up is actually terrific:

Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a self-effacing writer who’s following up a marginally successful memoir with her first novel, which has gone through twenty-seven drafts, each one foisted on her supportive husband Don — played by the achingly sexy Tobias Menzies (”The Crown”) — for constructive criticism.

To Beth’s face, Don’s been nothing but supportive and complimentary. But one day she overhears him telling her sister’s husband — the excellent Arian Moayed (”Succession”) — that he secretly hates the novel and is sick of hearing about it.

This news understandably devastates Beth, but Louis-Dreyfus won’t — or can’t — bring the level of pain to the scene that this scenario requires.

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She seems so concerned with tamping down her natural energy, lest we mistake Beth for one of the many fun, ‘emotion-on-tap’ characters she’s played on TV, that she ends up robbing herself, the movie, and the audience of the apoplectic aria we’re crying out for.

A more facile actor would make multiple meals out of Beth’s discovery — and the subsequent chill it brings to her marriage. But Louis-Dreyfus plays it all on one note: a dour sulkiness that puts a drag on the rest of the film instead of kicking it into a higher gear.

And in the scenes with her son, Elliot — the superb Owen Teague (”To Leslie”) — the contrast between his seething level of honesty and her tepid vacuity is startling to watch: Like a tennis pro playing with a first timer, every serve of Teague’s is chucked by Louis-Dreyfus right into the net.

She’s clearly out of her league here, and director Holofcener just lets Louis-Dreyfus play the drab middle ground right up to the end.

There’s a movie in here, somewhere. Menzies makes Don into a credible therapist suffering an identity crisis, and David Cross (”Arrested Development”) and his actual wife Amber Tamblyn (”Joan of Arcadia”) provide the film’s only genuine laughs as a bickering couple unhappy with Don’s counseling. Best of all is a welcome appearance by the always marvelous Jeanne Berlin as Beth’s no nonsense mom.

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But the various strands of story just drift along like toy boats on a windless pond. Every supposed crisis is a nonstarter: toothless and easily resolved by a series of unearned third act rescues that give the film the banal circularity of a self help pamphlet.

Like an easy listening mix on Spotify, “You Hurt My Feelings” is pleasant, but you won’t hear anything you haven’t heard before.

IN THEATERS

An LA-based playwright, JUSTIN TANNER has more than twenty produced plays to his credit, including Voice Lessons, Day Drinkers, Space Therapy, Wife Swappers, and Coyote Woman. His Pot Mom received the PEN-West Award for Best Play.

He has written for the TV shows Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life and the short-lived Love Monkey. He wrote, directed and edited 88 episodes of the web series Ave 43, available on YouTube.

Tanner is the current Playwright in Residence for the Rogue Machine Theatre in Hollywood, where his new play Little Theatre, of December of 2022, was met with rave reviews. Charles McNulty of the LA Times writes, "Engrossing... a comedy à clef... “Little Theatre” is invaluable.'"