How is it possible that Jennifer Lawrence, one of our breeziest and most relatable movie stars, has never headlined a comedy before? Though naturally funny in public appearances (not to mention besties with Amy Schumer), even a box office queen like J-Law can suffer from typecasting. So it goes when your Oscar-winning breakthrough role involves chainsawing bodies in the swamp with Dale Dickey.
Well, No Hard Feelings is here to change all that. This summer comedy is an old-school raunch-fest with plenty of laughs that nevertheless might've made its way to the party one round of Beer Pong too late. Mid-budget star-centric comedies like this have now become a rarity on the big screen, and this one, sweet and totally agreeable as it is, probably isn't revolutionary enough to alter that downward trajectory.
"Sweet" isn’t really the first word that pops to mind when you hear the logline for No Hard Feelings, which feels beamed in from the distant era of broad '80s sex comedies like Porky’s and Weird Science. Lawrence plays Maddie, a poor Montauk townie who needs to save her inherited home from evil real estate developers (yes, really), and so answers an ad in the classifieds to "date" an awkward 19-year-old named Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) for the summer before he heads to college.
Those quotations marks around the word "date" are right there in the ad itself, which was placed by Percy's helicopter parents Allison and Laird (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick). These two are flabbergasted by their son's inability to deal with the outside world, even as they chase after his every spill with a broom and tell him he's a very good boy with their every other breath.
Millennial versus Gen Z warfare steers No Hard Feelings to unexpected places.
Credit: SonyAt 32 years old, Maddie is a hair older than what they’re looking for for Percy, and the movie wrings a lot of comedy mileage out of everyone treating gorgeous surfer girl Jennifer Lawrence as if she's an ancient sea hag that just floated up from the bottom of the Long Island Sound. Indeed, it's the generational divide between millennials and Gen Z that is the foundational jumping-off point for most of the laughs in No Hard Feelings. There are lots of phone addiction gags, of course, but one of the most insightful generational digs when is Maddie tries to insult two straight high school guys by questioning their sexuality. When they gasp at her outdated homophobia, it's a sharp swipe, easily elucidating the differences a scant decade in age can make. She does seem genuinely out of date all of a sudden, and the jokes about the frailty of Percy's generation start to cut both ways.
But Maddie, an educated product of the gig economy – her main job is driving Uber – manages to convince Allison and Laird that she's the right 32-year-old sea hag for the gig anyway. And so they send her off to pick up their son at the Animal Rescue where he volunteers, and before Maddie can ask to see his weiner, she's, uhh, asking to see his weiner. Dog, that is.
That’s the level of joke we’re working with here. If it wasn’t for all of the precise generational humor and its attitude towards sex work – the film judges Maddie for a lot of bad behavior, but making money from sex is never one of them – you might assume this was a script that director Gene Stupnitsky and his co-writer John Phillips found buried in a time capsule from the year 1987.
But that's also part of the thing’s easy charm; it's not asking a lot from us, and its actors are good enough that they make most of the dumb stuff land. That's harder than it looks! And Lawrence, even in a fully nude fight scene, never breaks a sweat.
Jennifer Lawrence lets it all hang out, for laughs.
But best of all, she and Feldman (who played the titular role in Dear Evan Hansen during a 2019 Broadway run) have an immediate easy chemistry. And the fact that it's always more of a brother-sister vibe that they're unearthing between one another also, antithetically, ends up working in the film's favor; a lot of the cringe comedy comes straight from the fact that Maddie and Percy are play-acting at something they are very clearly never meant to be.
And so watching them steer themselves toward that sweet spot becomes an arc it's not hard to root for, even as Maddie's behavior and desperation goes, on occasion, wildly over the top. (Such as in the aforementioned naked fight.) It's she who must come to grips with the young man's admirable sincerity, and then eventually find a way into her own. And they're not going to let any premature ejaculation get in their way. Which is how it ought to be! Not since American Pie has a sex comedy made awkward hook-ups so sweet.
No Hard Feelings opens nationwide in theaters June 23, 2023.
