Oh, but I do have some hard feelings about this movie! So many, in fact. The entire time I was watching No Hard Feelings (2023) I could imagine all the Reply Guys—with their snarling pent-up energy—just waiting to whip out their keyboards to remind us about age of consent laws, which make it “totally legal” for 32-year-old woman to try to deflower a gawky 19-year-old boy at his parents’ behest before he goes off to college, so she can get the car they’re offering in order to sustain her Uber business, which will allow her to pay off her property taxes and keep her dearly departed mother’s Montauk home from being sold to the wealthy summer real estate vultures, who will just tear it down and build a monstrosity. Look, when it’s not drawing humor from sexual assault, this movie has funny moments, but I personally couldn’t get past how damn much of the movie was about a grown-ass woman trying to lure a teenager into sex, which he clearly would prefer not to have right now. And it’s not being ironic or self-reflective or satirical or anything else that would make it interesting. Hell, the best Jennifer Lawrence could muster in an interview was some shit about how everything is going to offend someone. I rolled my eyes so hard I think I gave myself a brain MRI. I mean, this kind of movie has been made and made again. I thought we had moved on to less gross pastures.
So, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up one fine day to find her car getting seized by Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) because she hasn’t paid her property taxes. But, she argues, if she doesn’t have a car, she can’t drive for Uber, which is her main source of income over the summer. Gary doesn’t have much sympathy, mostly because he and Maddie once dated and then she ditched him, so we know Maddie is Emotionally Unavailable ™ . Maddie tries to wheedle her way back into his good graces, but just as her flirting seems to be getting somewhere a nearly naked Italian man wanders out of her house and spoils the whole ruse. Gary’s not buying that he’s her second cousin and that casually fondling her breasts is “part of the culture.” Ew. On so many levels. This leaves Maddie to rollerblade everywhere, which is moderately funny. She meets up with her lawyer and surfing buddy Gabe (Zahn McClarnon, who is Native American) and complains that “These people are moving in, trying to push me out? Do you have any idea what that feels like?” Gabe smiles knowingly, but says nothing and the moment passes because we certainly wouldn’t want to let anything get too real, or to pull the focus from Jennifer Lawrence.
After Maddie refuses to rent her house out, her friend Sara (Natalie Morales) finds an ad on Craigslist placed by parents looking for someone to date their “extremely smart, but socially very shy” son and “bring him out of his shell” before he leaves for college in exchange for a Buick Regal. Jim (Scott MacArthur), Sara’s boyfriend, points out that “ you won’t rent out your house, but you’ll rent out your vag?” The two women tell him to shut up and Maddie adds that “You have a Road Runner tattoo covering your entire back. I don’t think you should tell anyone what to do with their body.” And this is a line that I did laugh at. Then they talk about some of the reasons women have sex. Maddie had sex once to get out of playing Settlers of Catan. Sara had sex to get out of a morning commute. And Sara also had sex once because she was afraid the guy was going to kill her, which is supposed to be humorous because that guy was Jim. Is this supposed to be somehow liberating that women can have sex in order to get out of more onerous tasks (or death)? Like, why is the idea of women using sex as a “get out of something free” card so appealing?
The catch, of course, is that the ad is for someone in their early-to-mid-20s, but Maddie thinks she can maybe pass for that. So off she goes to meet the parents and discuss having sex with their child whose frontal lobe is still not fully set. She arrives at the house on roller blades, of course, where Allison (Laura Benanti) and Laird (Matthew Broderick) are waiting for her at the top of an ultra modern staircase. After some back and forth about how to pronounce Laird’s name, Maddie scales the stairs by gingerly sidestepping her way up as the pair watch from above, dressed in identical outfits of shades of off-white. (A side note: Maddie has shoes in her backpack. We know because she’s wearing them once inside. So why doesn’t she take two ticks and put them on before climbing the stairs? I know, humor, but it wasn’t all that funny.) Inside, they discuss their son Percy’s (Andrew Barth Feldman) predicament. Friends, it’s a tale as old as time: He’s a nerd, headed for Princeton, and he hasn’t gotten laid yet. His parents are all in a dither about what will happen to him if he goes off to college so sheltered and inexperienced, so they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands and hire a professional, so to speak. And what better way to do that than by offering up a Buick? In case it all wasn’t clear, Laird insists that Maddie should “date him hard.” Such fun! I mean, this plan should clearly be burned with fire. No one needs to be sexually ready to go to college. This whole premise feels musty and like it was pulled from the late-nineties-early-aughts ideas closet, without much thought to how it might work in today’s climate.
Anyway, of this plan, Percy shall not know a shred, so Maddie casually shows up at the animal shelter where he volunteers, inquiring about a dog to adopt. She eschews the other kid working there and insists that she must speak to Percy, who looks shell-shocked and slightly terrified. Anyway, her performance is so over-the-top that I kept expecting her to morph into Jennifer Coolidge, which would have made the entire thing slightly more palatable because it would have been camp instead of…whatever this was, which was definitely uncomfortable. She shows up in a hot pink mini-dress and silver high-heeled sandals, because we’re strictly dealing in male fantasy. She leans over and asks if she can “touch his weiner,” by which she means his dog, of course, so it’s hi-larious. Then he interviews her about the dog she wants to adopt and she makes him increasingly more uncomfortable with her aggressive flirting and sexual overtures until he tries to escape by making up an excuse. (Please note that Percy could likely pass for a 14-year-old boy, but you know if the genders were reversed in this movie and it were an older man and a younger woman that the 19-year-old would look like…well, probably Jennifer Lawrence. Why? Oh, you know why, friends. Sing with me! The hills are alive with the sounds of the PATRIARCHYYYYYY.) But Maddie has her eyes on the Buick and insists on giving him a ride home in the large green van she’s borrowed for the day. Anyway, all this leads to him macing her right in the face. She screams and falls on the ground. And he yells that she tried kidnapping him to which she responds, “I can’t kidnap you. You’re 19. Grow up.” Uh, yeah. Folks, that’s not how kidnapping works. Just because it has the word kid in it doesn’t mean it’s reserved for minors. What the actual fuck? But! After some more arguing they determine that she just thought he was hot and THEY AGREE TO GO ON A DATE. Look, I can suspend disbelief like a champ, but this really is stretching the limits of those muscles.
On their date, she orders him a long island iced tea, which he spits out and says is the “worst iced tea” he’s ever had. Maddie helpfully explains that he’s going to college soon and he’s going to need to learn how to drink. Ah yes, that’s right, let’s just squash this boy into a mold of societal expectations instead of allowing him to find his own form. Learning to get hammered on alcohol you neither enjoy nor can tolerate is exactly why we send bright young minds to places like Princeton. She keeps pressuring him to drink, to have sex, to do whatever she considers “adult,” while the more sensitive, grounded Percy makes it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want to drink and only wants to have sex with someone he cares about. How’s that for a perfectly fucking reasonable kid? It’s wildly uncomfortable to watch Maddie continuously come on to him and say things, “this kid is unfuckable.” I spent a lot of time trying to parse if these things were just meant as humorous or if there was anything deeper and darker in their meaning. Any greater commentary on sexual assault, expectations, and grooming, but sadly I don’t think the movie makers intended for there to be anything more than yuks galore. Ugh, there’s more to this movie, but it’s largely not worth it for me to unpack here on the page. The upshot is that Maddie learns a lot from her experiences with Percy, and isn’t that just great? For a whole grown-ass person to suck some life lessons out of a person who is still teetering on the precipice of independence? Percy gains some courage from the whole experience, which I would argue the kid had the entire time and it’s just no one recognized it or was willing to wait for it to emerge in its own damn time.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 