Because the advertisements for the new comedy No Hard Feelings have billed the film as an uncouth romp in the grandly off-color tradition of hard-R raunch, ticket-buyers may be somewhat surprised to find a heartfelt love letter to Montauk scrawled in the margins around the dirty doodles.
More than a telegenic setting, the harbor town nestled on the easternmost tip of Long Island really means something to the characters that live there, a blue-collar haven of breezy mornings and balmy nights rapidly growing too expensive for the locals fostering its barnacle-encrusted charm. The born-and-bred resent the tourists that pour in from the city and New York’s affluent suburbs with each summer, all the while depending on their money to make a nut that’ll last through the more sparsely trafficked remainder of the year. The script’s stakes chiefly concern touchy-feely stuff, but it still finds time to speak to the question of how much longer the weatherbeaten homes and salty-dog dock bars can survive in trying times.
The production shot at Ted’s Fishing Station, a watering hole in Point Lookout located a two-hour drive west from Montauk, and so it helps with small-town verisimilitude to have a smart-mouthed, comely yet tomboyish girl-next-door type slinging G&Ts behind the bar. Enter Jennifer Lawrence, Kentucky native, high school dropout at 14, and one of the few A-tier movie stars left able to credibly portray an ordinary person in the lineage of Sandra Bullock. As the kid sister to a litter of brothers, she possesses a knockabout affability instrumental to the likable dirtbag Maddie, in her element both while aggressively flirting in a bodycon wrap dress and drinking a beer in a floppy oversize polo. She’s the elusive Cool Girl, albeit to a fault – one can imagine her watching a hockey game of her own volition, but she also pushes away anyone close to her with excessive drinking and sleeping around. In addition to cueing up hijinks, accepting an offer from a wealthy couple to deflower their sweetly awkward son will acquaint her with a newfound maturity, as viewers know it would. It has to; that’s our J-Law.
As a crowd-pleaser with respectable box-office receipts to match (though the film opened in fourth place this past weekend, $15m isn’t too shabby for an original comedy, just shy of Cocaine Bear money), No Hard Feelings represents the completion of a mini-comeback for Lawrence, who shrewdly made herself scarce during the latter half of the previous decade to pre-empt overexposure and give herself the space to start a family. She had first risen to prominence for skinning squirrels in the gritty Ozark-set indie Winter’s Bone in 2009 and attained Oscar-fixture status for her collaborations with David O Russell through the early ’10s, playing brassy, imperfect women attempting to muscle through their deep flaws and mostly failing. (My research indicates that around this same time, she appeared in a series of films called The Hunger Games. I, like culture in general, have no memory of this.) She authentically submitted herself as a celebrity of the people during a moment fixated on the #relatable, wiping out on her way to the Academy award podium and celebrating afterward by smoking a joint in Hawaii.
In a recent appearance on the chicken-wing interview web series Hot Ones, Lawrence made the astute observation that all of her major roles share an adulthood thrust upon them before they’re ready, a throughline maintained in her career’s latest phase. (The other: an all-in commitment to physicality, her feats of dance and archery one-upped in No Hard Feelings by a buck-naked beatdown of some insouciant teens.) As a young bride in mother!, a ballerina forced into the assassin biz in Red Sparrow, a burnout scientist saddled with the weight of the world in Don’t Look Up, and a shell-shocked veteran in last fall’s exceptional Causeway, she contoured a struggle to live up to one’s own expectations into a diverse array of genres and tones. Her grounded everywoman quality – the caliber of good looks that gets a person an Abercrombie modeling gig as a teen offset by the un-self-seriousness that gets those photos pulled – has only ripened as she’s entered her 30s, the point at which her characters’ grown-up age nearly matches the responsibility heaped upon them.
In this respect, No Hard Feelings plays more as a reintroduction than a reinvention, a reminder of Lawrence’s innate appeals that haven’t gone anywhere during her self-imposed semi-hiatus. Like a greatest hits collection taking human form, the role of Maddie synthesizes the homegrown hardiness of Winter’s Bone with the sentimentalized dysfunction of Silver Linings Playbook. In that film, another oddly angled take on the romcom, she presented a thoroughly Hollywoodified notion of depression not far from the gift-wrapped daddy issues that No Hard Feelings’ script inserts into the second act.
Though their most meaningful commonality is their incompleteness, the striving of a work in progress that first endeared a klutzy, self-effacing form of the screen idol to the public a little more than 10 years ago. Lawrence’s facility for comic timing, the increasingly rare capacity to identify and deliver a punchline, may be somewhat unexpected in light of her seldom humor-centric filmography. But her dinged-up humanity strikes a comfortingly familiar note, one we recall not just from her past performances but from our own experiences with the many real people living along those same lines. Walk into any neighborhood dive, and she could be there behind the counter, asking what it’s gonna be.
