You Do What You Gotta Do

The romantic comedy used to be one of the reliable movie types in theaters. While action and adventure have always had their place, with big blockbusters getting solid budgets to solace explosions and gun fights and everything else across the Silver Screen, there was a time when romantic comedies could hold their own. With smaller budgets, they could reliably perform well for a few weeks, make $50 to $100 Mil, and then be reliable standards on rentals, home video, and broadcast. They’d make their cash, and the movie companies could go back home, satisfied with all the money they managed to print.

Those days are largely gone at this point. Not only has the cost of making a film gone up (sometimes way up), to the point where even “low budget” films now require $30 to $50 Mil to produce, but the whole market for films in general has changed. Physical rentals are gone. Home video sales have cratered. Money made from streaming, when every company has to have their own streaming service so their only cash they make is a monthly fee from subscribers, doesn’t make up for what they used to make on broadcast channels. Cheap films aren’t reliable standards because there isn’t that “long tail” to help them find profitability, and that means that films that used to be everywhere, like romantic comedies, are now hardly made at all.

Not that audiences would show up for them anyway. If it’s not a blockbuster people don’t tend to turn out, instead figuring they’ll catch these kinds of films on streaming later, “for free”. Why pay for a little film when it costs the same to watch that as it would a big budget blockbuster. Streaming destroyed a lot, and a film like No Hard Feelings, which even a decade ago probably would have been a solid hit considering it’s a fun, raunchy comedy with a big name star in it, was left to languish and die when it came out a couple of years ago.

The film stars Jennifer Lawrence as Maddie Barker, a crude and rough-around-the-edges bartender and Uber driver. Maddie lives in Montauk, NY, a beachfront ‘burb where all the rich people vacation every year. She’s also behind on her property taxes, with the city ceasing her car until she pays what she owes… and if she doesn’t do it by the end of summer, they’ll seize her house as well. But without a car how can she make the money she needs? Uber driving can make a lot of money during the season, but without her car she’s stuck without her primary means of money. It’s a Catch-22 for her.

Except then she sees an ad in the paper. A couple – Laura Benanti as Allison Becker and Matthew Broderick as Laird Becker – have a college-bound son, Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman), who needs help getting out of his shell. He spends his days stuck up in his room, or working over at an animal shelter, and he doesn’t seem to have friends. He also doesn’t do all the things that high school kids do, like partying, drinking, or dating. They want someone (eventually Maddie) to get him out and show him a good time. Date him, sex him, do the things he needs before college. If she does, they’ll give her their old Buick. Now all Maddie has to do is convince Percy to go out with her… which is no easy feat at all.

The basic structure of No Hard Feelings is fairly similar to plenty of other romantic comedies (Failure to Launch is one such film that springs to mind). A woman comes in to help parents get a stunted man-child to go out and find themselves. In the process she ends up falling for the person she’s only supposed to be “dating”, but since their relationship is built on a lie (or at least a hidden motive) everything falls apart once the truth comes out. Can they make it work? Should they even be together at all? It’s well-worn ground in the genre, to be sure.

What makes this film at least somewhat different is that the woman is really the stunted “woman-child”, and the guy she comes in to date eventually just needs to find themself in a healthy fashion. The film inverts a lot of tropes, and does things differently, all based on the various angles the film takes with these characters. Maddie needs to grow up, not unlike Percy, and she can use this relationship to find herself in the process. It helps the film feel different than just a simple retread of tropes we’ve seen before.

Also, Maddie is older than Percy by 13 years, so there’s certainly a different feel to the relationship than there would be if they were on equal footing. Maddie has to help Percy, but she has to stop him from getting too attached. You don’t really want these two ending up together, so it’s not a standard romantic comedy (like Failure to Launch, or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, or any of those other films that, largely, starred Matthew McConaughey back in the 2000s). This film finds its own footing, and its own angles, to explore which keeps things fresh and interesting.

At the same time, it is refreshing to see someone that’s flawed, like Maddie, without it being their whole personality. Scripts too often pitch a character’s personality as the whole of their being, and, especially in a romantic comedy, you’re supposed to judge a person just by how they act on the surface because very rarely will the film ever delve deeper. No Hard Feelings is all about exploring these flawed characters, though, digging into the reasons why they act the way they do while it attempts to find ways to break them free of their destructive patterns. It’s a comedy, yes, but a dramatic one.

But yes, it is a raunchy sex comedy as well. Maddie is there to have sex with Percy, eventually, once she manages to get him out of his shell. She comes on strong, and a lot of the humor comes from her attempts, and failures, at getting him horny for her. Her repeated attempts, sometimes involving a lot of physical abuse for her, can be very funny, and Lawrence handles it all with aplomb.

I wouldn’t have thought of her as someone that could handle this kind of film, considering she’s mostly known for dramas or dramatic performances in blockbusters, but she does really well here. Her Maddie is grounded and realistic even as she’s getting abused and mocked regularly. She brings real pathos to her character, making her more than the kind of “shrill” romantic lead that was expected for these kinds of films back in the 1990s and 2000s. It just goes to show that you can put real actors into these kinds of films and get a solid, watchable film in the process.

This film works because it treats its characters seriously even while it’s putting them in an absurd setting. It sometimes careens and stumbles and it fights hard to get these characters together for any length of time, just like Maddie has to overcompensate to get Percy to notice her. But when it fires, it fires hard and it finds a lot of laughs and solid emotion at the same time. This is the kind of film Hollywood could make regularly, they’d just have to be willing to spend the $45 Mil to make it. But when a film like this lands in theaters and only brings in $83 Mil from disinterested audiences, you can see why this whole genre has all but been abandoned by Hollywood. In that case of No Hard Feelings, that’s really sad.