‘No Hard Feelings’
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Jennifer Lawrence, she of the adorably clumsy slip up the steps at the Oscars a few years back, and a multitude of other minor bonks, rude noises and silly faux pas at news conferences, turns out to be exceptionally gifted at physical comedy.
Playing a Long Island native named Maddie, who stands to lose her late mother’s house in Montauk because of the outrageous property taxes incurred from growing up poor in a wildly affluent summer beach town, she’s a fiery hot mess in a clingy dress, the kind of woman you would be supremely attracted to, and utterly terrified of, in equal measure.
In a desperate bid to keep her job as an Uber driver after her car is repossessed — by a former tow truck-driver boyfriend (Ebon-Moss Bachrach) — Maddie accepts a dubious proposal by a pair of very wealthy, extremely hovering parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti). Essentially, they want a young woman to bed down their introverted son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), so he can gain confidence in himself, and head off to Princeton in the fall with a good head of social steam, as it were.
In exchange for “dating” their son, they will bequeath Maddie with an aged but fully functional Buick Regal, such that she can return to her Uber career, and thus get to keep her house. The trick is Percy can’t know they’ve arranged all this for him, which would totally defeat the purpose of their efforts, so Maddie has to find a way to meet and seduce him as if this were a totally natural occurrence.
You can certainly see where the gags are going to be coming from, as the kind-hearted, innocent Percy has no earthly idea what to do with this bodacious pin-up girl come to life and gyrat
ing in front of him, especially when Maddie’s riotous va va va voom come-hithering proves far too much for him to handle. The early scenes between them crackle with a kind of comic delight — scared for his life, when she at first insists on driving him home from the animal shelter he volunteers in, the terrified young lad actually maces her in the face, then has to douse her with a garden hose when he realizes she’s not trying to kidnap him.
Lawrence proves game for just about anything, including a riotous nude brawl with some teens who try to steal their clothes off the beach one night, using her bawdy sensuality to gleeful comic effect (“I’ve had sex to avoid playing ‘Settlers of Catan’,” she confides to her friend), but the film begins to seriously wobble when it forces its cynical heroine to soften and grow up in a dreary female take of the Judd Apatow school of “man-child must take responsibility” school of comedy. This drags the film down into a series of forced “lessons” in the more tortured second and third acts, eventually completely running itself aground by the end, in which everything has been far too neatly — and ethically — resolved (but at least avoiding the risk of an adult forcing herself onto a much younger innocent, even if sanctioned by his parents).
It also has to be said, the script, co-penned by director Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips, beyond the first act, consistently takes the easy way out at every turn, and never more so than with Percy, a veritable poster-child for lazily convenient plot convention. He goes from online introvert, soaked in fear and neurosis, to affable, besotted paramour seemingly overnight (a kid too shy to speak to anyone at school somehow sings a sweet ballad while playing piano to an entire restaurant full of people), suffering from the whims of the writers as they make him contort ridiculously in order to conform to the needs of their script at any given moment.
For a film that promises to be a raunchy sex comedy throwback, supposedly with a more enlightened female perspective (in the opening minutes we have a buff Italian bull sporting a banana hammock and doing deep squats in his underwear), the way it loses its nerve and turns damningly conventional is a severe disappointment. Still, I guess we can call it a kind of progress that the flimsiest element in this sputtering flick turns out to be the male protagonist for once, call it a triumph for feminism.