I was pretty excited about No Hard Feelings, ranking it my 4th most anticipated movie of the summer in my summer preview. It didn’t meet these expectations, but the movie itself raised a lot of points that I want to talk about. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m going to try and process and articulate all this movie has to say about sex, comedy as a genre, and economics.
First, some background. No Hard Feelings is the second directorial effort from Gene Stupnitsky, who’s also written a bit for The Office and co-created the sleeper hit Jury Duty FreeVee show earlier this year. His previous film was Good Boys, back in 2019, which is a pint-size version of something like The Hangover crossed with Superbad. It’s a pretty decent late-night comedy movie.
No Hard Feelings follows Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a 32-year-old woman who’s spent her entire life in the seaside community of Montauk. She drives for Uber and also bartends at a local beach bar. Her now-deceased mother left her a large house, fully paid off, but the bank is going to seize it if she doesn’t cover the taxes by the end of the summer.
In a seizure of assets, she loses her car right as the summer busy season was starting. She needs her car to drive for Uber, and she needs to drive for Uber to make the money to keep the house. In looking for a car she stumbles on a Craigslist ad placed by two overprotective parents (played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who will give an old Buick Regal to someone willing to “date” their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). (Admittedly, I’ve mostly repeated the trailer so far, but the details matter as we go). The movie unfolds as a series of outlandish moments and hijinks. Along the way, Maddie and Percy grow close developing some seemingly genuine attraction. Maddie shares weighty personal details of her life, and Percy tries to explain why he’s so withdrawn. Their “generational differences” are a big part of the middle of the movie, culminating in a brief house party scene (basically the one from Booksmart but nowhere near as good). Eventually, Percy learns of his parents’ nefarious dealings, and loses trust in Maddie, they have a brief falling out, and then reconnects as friends at the end. Maddie has a “getting her life together” montage, sells the house to her friends expecting a new baby (it’s not clear how they will pay the taxes on it…), and leaves for California to live out a long-deferred dream, dropping Percy off at Princeton on the way.
With this summary in mind, I want to do a reading of the film through three different critical lenses.
No Hard Feelings as a Comedy (and also some notes on race)
As a comedy, this movie is kind of a big deal. The only other one of its kind to release since the pandemic was Bros last fall, a movie that I loved but that bombed at the box office (you don’t have to wait long for more; Joy Ride comes out July 7th and Strays releases August 18th). The R-rated adult comedy, which for decades was a staple of the summer, has seemed on life support since the mid-2010s. With No Hard Feelings (and Joy Ride and Strays), studios are hoping to reverse this trend now that people are back at the movies.
As a comedy, No Hard Feelings seems to want to be two things. First and foremost, it wants to be a late 2000s comedy movie. It particularly reminds me of Knocked Up in which a pair, pushed together by sex-driven circumstances, gradually become friends, and the protagonist learns to grow up. You can also find echoes of Superbad and Wedding Crashers throughout, though it lacks the comedic balance and winning side characters of those other movies.
NHF pretty much succeeds as being a 2000s comedy landing the expected comedic bits (not all spoiled by the trailer, but a few would definitely have been funnier if one hadn’t seen the trailer). It’s even got the recontextualized classic 70s/80s song that was a staple of these movies (my favorite use of this idea is “Beth” in Role Models). It also has the expected side characters, but they don’t get enough screen time to rise to the level of memorable (a bummer as I love Natalie Morales).
There’s also a definite race problem baked into this formula. Maddie’s best friend is Sarah, played by Morales. Her ethnicity isn’t addressed in the film, but she’s clearly not white in a movie and setting that is very white. As a character, she has basically three main scenes. In the first, she helps Maddie realize she should go for this strange opportunity. This is standard best friend stuff and not too significant. She does something similar later (if I remember right). But the big problem is her ultimate role in the movie, which is to aid the self-actualization of Maddie in Maddie selling Sarah and her husband Jim (Scott MacArthur) her mom’s house. It is a gesture of explicit white saviorism that reveals the lack of progress in such matters in the past 15 years.
I should also note that Percy’s friend, who gets only two scenes, is even more limited. He’s one of the film’s only Asian characters, and his role is reduced to a horny clerk when Maddie comes into the animal shelter and then he helps Percy destroy her car. Oh, and the film’s other notable Asian character is a predatory real estate guy.
Moreover, often the writing in this film just isn’t up to the level of its ambition. Because though this movie mostly wants to be a 2000s comedy, it can’t help but trying to nod to more progressive times. It saves most of these jokes for an entirely too brief-to-be-useful house party scene in which the joke is how out of touch Maddie is with the youth. It’s a fine joke but a strange one in a film that strongly identifies with Maddie. It’s also a joke that’s been made continually since at least 2012 with 21 Jump Street (and then again in Blockers and Booksmart). The film is definitely the least successful when it’s trying to be more weighty and ambitious than its simple premise will allow. On one hand, it wants to critique the ideas of Knocked Up or Pineapple Express—in which Seth Rogan’s character dates a high-schooler in a subplot that is called out by others in the movie, but also mostly glossed over—but it also wants to benefit off the legacy of these films and the nostalgia that audiences like me will feel toward them.
So as a comedy, it’s a mess. It mostly works as a throwback to 15 years ago, but this comes with the same racist and sexist hang-ups that make modern audiences say these movies “haven’t aged well.” But when it tries to be more “with the times,” it falters considerably, which make the racist moments, like Maddie providing the house for Sarah, all the more annoying.
No Hard Feelings and (Lack of) Sex
As much as I love comedy movies like this, how NHF intersects with comedies of the 2000s isn’t why I’m writing this. I’m writing this to talk about how it deals with sex. Sex at the core of this movie. Maddie has plenty of it, Percy doesn’t have sex, and Percy’s parents think he should probably be having sex. But for all the focus on sex, the movie is hard to decipher as to what it actually says about sex.
Let’s start with Maddie. We meet her in front of her house. Gary, a fling-turned sort of relationship, is there to tow away her car. Gary is hurt over how Maddie left him without much warning and now Maddie is having some fling with another guy. Throughout the movie, we see at least two other men that Maddie has either dated or is currently hooking up with (the latter of which is among the funniest scenes not seen in trailers). So, Maddie has sex, and she notes a few times that she has sex for many different reasons. Sarah and Maddie together note that they’ve slept with guys in order to have a shorter commute or get out of playing Settlers of Catan. It’s important that Sarah co-signs Maddie’s behavior here. Sarah is clearly pregnant the entire movie, a complicated reminder of her sex-having…and impending family structure. But because both Maddie and Sarah have the same attitude toward “casual” sex, the film is able to position Maddie’s attitude in terms of a generational norm. The film, to my reading, avoids “slut shaming” Maddie. She has sex. That’s perfectly fine. And this part is important: that’s what adults in their mid-late 20s do.
The film behaves very differently toward the idea of sex work. Though Maddie outwardly says that she sees nothing wrong with sex work, the film doesn’t really act as if this is true. The premise of the movie is sex work. Maddie is going to offer sexual services (probably best to ignore that such services appear to be unwanted…) in exchange for a used car. But the film goes to great and explicit lengths to make sure that this action, which is at least very close to sex work, isn’t perceived as such. Maddie frequently denies that she’s a sex worker. The film very much wants viewers to maintain a distinction between Maddie and “sex workers” or what they would more likely just call prostitutes. This distinction serves to reinforce the stigma that surrounds sex work. It’s quite incredible to have a film centered on sexual transactions that also definitely wants you to think “Yeah, but not that sexual transaction.” NHF then implies that this transaction—which is secret, manipulative, and not consensual—is more wholesome than other sex transactions which are none of those things. And that’s a very big problem.
Which brings us to Percy. We don’t know much about Percy in terms of sex. He’s a virgin and there are a few mentions of his porn habits. It should be noted that such reference is to whether or not he is gay, which, of course, means nothing! As the film is anti-sex work, it’s also still beholden to a mostly passé notion that masturbation or solo sex is lesser than partnered sex. Percy does consent to sex with Maddie…eventually. Someone more familiar than I am with consent can parse if this is valid since he’s kept in the dark about the plan. This aside, the film deserves credit for its focus on Percy’s consent (even if it undercuts that with the premise). Percy, spoiler alert, doesn’t have sex with Maddie or anyone else in the movie. He sort of has sex with Maddie, ejaculating on her thigh, but it’s played as a joke that he thinks this “counts.” This is the bigger point. The film still very much holds a rigid understanding of “virginity” which, again, is pretty outdated by 2023.
Percy doesn’t care about “losing his virginity” in the way that the boys of American Pie did 25 years ago. His parents care about that for him. This is essential to understanding how sex functions in NHF. Unlike in so many movies, it is the parents that set this goal for Percy. It’s also Maddie’s goal as a means to an end. Percy has little agency making the movie read uncomfortably like Cruel Intentions at times. The fact that this is his parents’ goal underscores the generational divides in the film. There are three “generations”: parents/Gen. X, Percy/Gen Z, and Maddie, a millennial in the middle. This past semester I taught an essay from about 5 years ago called “Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?” The essay, by Jean Twenge, has a lot of interesting points about smartphone use—this is why I taught it—but my class of college freshmen kept getting hung up on how Twenge would wax poetic about an adolescence of sex and recklessness a la Fast Times at Ridgemont High. My students simply couldn’t comprehend how such things could be synonymous with high school.
At one point in the house party sequence, Maddie expresses a similar point saying, “Doesn’t anybody fuck anymore?” The answer to this is complicated, but the movie’s point isn’t. This is a movie that does see sex as an important touchstone of growing up and does bemoan its perceived lack in Gen. Z. It’s not alone in this failing. For all its efforts of inclusion, I hate the Netflix show Sex Education for the same reason. Our main character there is “fixed” by discovering sexual attraction and encouraged to have sex. I don’t think No Hard Feelings is anti-asexuality, but it is pro-allosexuality. This is to say that I don’t think it’s as disparaging to Percy’s lack of sex as the film is interested in espousing a pro-sex agenda. It should be noted that there’s basically no queerness in this film, either, reinforcing the casual heteronormative world of the film. It’s a film that is pretty conservative when it comes to sex and images of family, but also feels like it should be less so. It’s a good impulse that doesn’t get to the screen, instead reinforcing an anti-sex work and pro-allo mindset.
No Hard Feelings and the Gig Economy
I was excited for NHF both as a throwback to the movies I love, as a chance to see a big-budget comedy, and for what the trailer presented about economics. By nature of her being an Uber driver, Maddie had the possibility to be a character through which the film would say something interesting about current economic conditions. It doesn’t do this. A large elephant in the room here is COVID. Montauk is the kind of community that suffered a lot from a lack of tourism throughout the pandemic, but the film doesn’t make clear if we are in a reality with or without COVID. On the one hand this is fine. Why bring down your comedy movie with reality? But on another hand, the world of this movie is clearly something quite close to our world. Percy is going to be the class of 2027, so this isn’t the late 2010s. The gig economy and gentrification are in full effect. Class is a huge part of this movie, but one that is rarely addressed. There is a definite tension between Maddie’s working-class existence and Percy’s world of wealth.
Occasionally the film does go so far as to say how Percy’s life will always be easy because he’s rich. But it doesn’t say a lot of other things. It doesn’t say that people like Percy’s parents are exactly why Maddie is in danger of losing the house, and why her taxes have gone up. It doesn’t say that Percy’s parents could fix her economic situation in a blink, and it would mean nothing to them. It doesn’t say how insultingly small an offer their used Buick Regal is for this task, whether Maddie has sex with Percy or not. Furthermore, the film doesn’t say that it’s super fucked up that Uber drivers have to use their own cars for Uber, and that Uber doesn’t pay anything for mileage or maintenance. It’s further fucked up that Maddie exists in a world where she has to make a ton of money in a high-stress short period of time in order to survive the rest of the year. It’s disgusting that people like Maddie have to rely on bullshit like Uber to get by, yet that is the basis of the modern gig economy.
I understand that this film isn’t going to rigorously interrogate such economic systems, but if you’re going to make money such a central part of your film, you need to do something. This goes back to the film’s vague conservative ideology. There is no blame placed on the system, Uber, or Percy’s rich parents. Maddie’s right anger at how gentrification has ruined her life is brushed off as just the way the world is. And the “solution” is that she’s forced out. The movie frames this as a heroic moment, a conquering of the past and realizing dreams. But the harsh reality is that her life in Montauk was untenable, and she was left with no choice. She heroically saves the house on her work and merit, things the film rewards. No attention is given to the systems that create such economic conditions in the first place.
The more I think about it, the more I see how this movie fails. It’s a bit racist and more than a bit stigmatizing of sex work. It articulates a position that having sex is a better way to go through life than not having sex, and it ignores the economic systems of the world. Its broadly conservative ideology suggests that individuals are to blame for their lot in life and that the heteronormative status quo is good. I’m still trying to formulate what this genre of comedy is, but in the case of No Hard Feelings it’s maybe best exemplified by the Tesla owned by Percy’s parents. It’s that Elon Musk-tech-bro vibe in comedy form. A very interesting movie, but one with a LOT of problems if you look even a little bit closer.
