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NO HARD FEELINGS MOVIE REVIEW 0:00 / 0:00 No Hard Feelings Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress with broad range. If you don’t believe me, check out one of her earlier, pre-fame films, Winter’s Bone . The movie is based on a gritty book by Daniel Woodrell and portrays the desperation of extreme poverty. The actress gives a performance that is both mesmerizing and gut wrenching. Because I appreciate Jennifer Lawrence’s skills, I wanted to like No Hard Feelings , but I wound up with some misgivings. Here is the premise of the movie. Lawrence plays Maddie, a woman in her young thirties who is living in a house in Montauk that she inherited from her mother. Post-high school, just as Maddie plans to launch herself, her mother becomes ill. Maddie abandons her dreams and stays in town to take care of her. After her mother dies, Maddie becomes enmeshed in a dead-end life; she’s miserable but can’t seem to muster up the energy to make changes. As the movie opens, Maddie’s house is about to be foreclosed. The income from her jobs as a bartender and Uber driver is not sufficient to pay her bills. After her car is towed away due to unpaid taxes, she sees an ad that offers a Buick Regal as payment for certain services. Parents of Percy, an awkward nineteen-year-old, want someone to “date” him before he heads off to Princeton in the fall. Their goal is for him to acquire social skills, confidence and let’s say, relationship experience. What possibly could go wrong in a movie about a thirty-ish woman using her sexual wiles to seduce an immature teen who still sleeps with a stuffed animal?” The saving grace of this film is that both Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman (Percy) are adept at bringing tenderness and humor to the screen. When the camera is on them and there are no over-the-top plot shenanigans going on, the movie is a pleasure to watch. Their interactions are clever and funny. At first, Maddie views her relationship with Percy as merely transactional. However, the
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