Don’t feel bad for writer-director Nicole Holofcener, though she has labored in the film and television industry for almost 30 years, much of it in relative obscurity. Don’t feel bad for her, because she’s a nepo baby who apprenticed under Woody Allen in her youth. Don’t feel bad for her, because she chooses to tell stories of wealthy white coastal elites rather than hustle for an assignment from Marvel. After all, with the just-opened You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener is receiving some of the best reviews of her career.
It’s not as though she’s ever been — or played — the victim. Stepdaughter to Charles Joffe, who produced many of Allen’s greatest films, including Annie Hall, Holofcener went on to become a poster child for the industry workhorse. She has written and directed seven features, including Lovely & Amazing (2001), Friends With Money (2006), and Enough Said (2013). Credited as a screenwriter on Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and The Last Duel (2021), she has also directed television — a lot of television — from sitcoms like Sex and the City and Parks and Recreation to dramedies and prestige comedies such as One Mississippi and Lucky Hank to the highly meme-able “Last Fuckable Day” sketch from the third season of Inside Amy Schumer.
Her films are ostensibly slight, running around 90 minutes a pop and centered on privileged people who worry that their emotional scars are cosmically unimportant. Within our current cycle of “eat the rich” satires (Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, The White Lotus) and brash reality shows that double as ads for predatory capitalism, Holofcener offers a vital counterpoint. She fixes her uniquely compassionate camera on bored suburbanites, sheepish trust fund babies, and upwardly mobile creative types, judgmental but insecure people paralyzed by their own relentless inner critics.
To that end: You Hurt My Feelings is a film about Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a Manhattan writer who discovers that her…
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