Film reviews: You Hurt My Feelings | L’immensità | Gran Turismo | Haunted Mansion
You Hurt My Feelings (15) ****
L’immensità (12A) ***
Gran Turismo (12A) *
Haunted Mansion (12A) *
It’s too bad You Hurt My Feelings is going straight to Prime Video in the UK. This smart, tart New York comedy from US indie veteran Nicole Holofcener is precisely the sort of grown-up fare that’s missing from the cinematic landscape. Starring the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Beth, a creative writing professor thrown into professional and personal disarray when she overhears her therapist husband confessing he doesn’t like her new novel, its plot could be written off as slight or inconsequential given the current state of the world. Yet the characters’ dilemmas are also the relatable, small-scale, everyday dilemmas that movies used to be about before English-language cinema became consumed with trauma narratives and never-ending threats to humanity’s very existence.
Amusingly, Holofcener takes a sly, satirical pop at this cultural shift. The title acknowledges the whiny narcissism underlying much of social media and Beth’s teaching job elicits a wonderfully funny scene of her trying to put a positive spin on all the horrifying personal experiences her students are planning to process through prose. Beth herself isn’t above such solipsistic over-sharing; she’s found minor success with a memoir about her unhappy childhood, though she’s also distraught to learn that her own experience of abuse – “Verbal abuse,” corrects her editor. “It was still abuse,” protests Beth – no longer cuts it now that she’s competing with younger, newer, more ethnically diverse voices writing about refugees, cancer, murder and more extreme forms of physical and emotional trauma.
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Hide AdHer ego, then, is already in a fragile state when she overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) tell her brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed, of Succession fame) that he doesn’t really like her first stab at fiction. Normally a relentless cheerleader of her work – he’s read all 20 drafts of her new book – Don’s accidental candour crushes her and its not long before her insecurity starts to threaten their hitherto cosy, rock-solid life.
As demonstrated in Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Please Give and the romantic comedy Enough Said, Holofcener has a knack for writing perceptive, effervescent dialogue that cuts deep. The recriminations that follow in You Hurt My Feelings are sharply written, underscoring the peculiar way the people you love most sometimes just need your unconditional support to shore up their own crippling sense of self-loathing. It helps too that in Louis-Dreyfus Holofcener is blessed with an actor whose comic gifts – particularly the seamless way she can toggle between sarcasm and sincerity without drawing attention to either – drown out the sound of tiny violins that might have accompanied Beth’s crisis of confidence, which, far from being inconsequential, deepens here into a bittersweet exploration of getting older and realising there are small wins to be had even when greatness eludes you.
If nothing else, the new Italian film L’immensità offers up the delectably kitschy sight of Penelopé Cruz dancing. Whether lip-syncing to pop music around the kitchen table with her kids or participating in full-blown variety-show routines in the film’s more elaborately imagined fantasy sequences, Cruz injects a proper dose of old-school movie glamour into this otherwise harsh tale of family dysfunction in 1970s Rome. The dancing is really a way for Cruz’s character, Clara, to momentarily escape the misery of her marriage to a boorish, violent, unfaithful husband, who blames her for the fact that their eldest daughter, Adriana (Luana Giuliani) is, to use the parlance of the day, a tomboy. Clara's fantasies are infectious: soon enough Adriana is conjuring up musical numbers of her own, and she also pretends to be descended from aliens, a way, perhaps, of making herself feel better about not yet having the language to explain how she really feels inside. Here, writer/director Emanuele Crialese never quite settles on whether the film is a coming-of-age story of a woman who acts like a girl or a girl who doesn’t want to become a woman. When both characters cut loose on their imaginary stages, though, everything clicks into place.
“It’s a great marketing opportunity,” declares Orlando Bloom’s race car executive early on in Gran Turismo. He’s talking about a competition to turn players of the titular multimillion-selling video game into real-world race car drivers. Delivered without irony, though, it’s really a blatant mission statement for what this sorry excuse for a film really is: a cynically conceived bit of corporate synergy. Produced by Sony, distributed by Sony, based on the Sony Playstation game, and featuring a whole subplot involving a vintage Sony Walkman, the film may play up its status as a true story about Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a Gran Turismo fan from Cardiff who really did become a professional driver. But the resulting film could be any off-the-peg underdog sports movie, so uninspired is it. Directed by the once-promising Neill Blomkamp (District 9), with thankless roles for Djimon Hounsou and David Harbour, the whole endeavour feels like the work of brand ambassadors. Geri Halliwell-Horner co-stars as Mardenborough’s mum.
Just as bad is Disney’s latest theme park cross-promotional opportunity Haunted Mansion. Two decades on from the Eddie Murphy version comes another duff effort, this time led by Lakeith Stanfield, Oscar-nominated for Judas and the Black Messiah recently and thoroughly wasted here as a widowed ghost tour operator press-ganged into helping Rosario’s Dawson’s single mother and her son escape a house full of malevolent spirits who refuse to let them leave. Jamie Lee Curtis follows her recent Oscar win by playing a disembodied head stuck in a crystal ball. Enough said.
You Hurt My Feelings is streaming now on Prime Video; L’immensità is cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 11 August, Gran Turismo and Haunted Mansion are in cinemas from 11 August