The list of things that Jennifer Lawrence can’t do on screen is a short one – she couldn’t sell us a mop drama in Joy and The Hunger Games: Mockingay – Part 1 remains a fail-safe cure for insomnia – but this boisterous sex comedy is still a surprisingly effective showcase for her range. With a patchy script and uneven tone, it shouldn’t work, but she physically wrenches laughs out of it.
Lawrence plays Maddie, a Montauk, Long Island bartender and part-time Uber driver whose home is under threat from a pile of unpaid property tax bills. When a bitter ex (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, wasted) tows her car, she’s left physically and financially marooned, facing up to losing the house that her late mum left her.
Then she spots a Craigslist ad placed by an affluent couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, brilliantly deadpan) who want to make a man out of their socially awkward 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), before he heads off to college. This involves overlooking the 13 year age gap and hiring Maddie as an escort. In return, she’ll get to keep a car and the chance to save her family home. ‘You won’t even rent out your house and now you’re going to rent out your vag?’ is her friends’ quizzical response.
Indeed, it’s a queasy deal that says a lot about the gentrifying out-of-towners who descend onto the beach community for the summer, forcing locals to become, well, sex workers to survive. In Jaws they get eaten; here, they get complained about, with Maddie and her besties (Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur) railing against ‘the summer people’ who jack up property prices and slowly squeeze them out.
But the script, co-written by director Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys) and John Phillips, isn’t really about social commentary or even sex work. Instead, it wants to have its cake and eat it, delivering ’80s-style horndog antics with just enough post-#MeToo sensitivity to make it palatable in these more enlightened times. That fudge has the tone veering around wildly: one minute, you’re watching an age-gap sex romp akin to Weird Science; the next the moody compositions are channelling The Graduate.
Jennifer Lawrence physically wrenches laughs out of it
Still, Lawrence is great as a messy thirtysomething trying to outrun her own life choices and some unfair financial realities. She gets able support from Feldman, rising above one-dimensional as the naive but sensitive and fast-learning Percy.
In its quieter moments, No Hard Feelings gestures towards real emotion. More often than not, though, it gets sidetracked by chaotic set pieces, with naked fistfights (the actress, surprisingly, goes full frontal here), mace sprayings and even an ingenious homage to The Shining, working Lawrence’s knack for slapstick to the funny bone. It’s fleeting fun, when a bit more honesty and candor might have made it her answer to Young Adult.
In cinemas worldwide now.
