Can Jennifer Lawrence resurrect the sex comedy?
Peter Tonguette
When the history of popular culture in our age is written, the period will be remembered as one of willful deprivation. We seem singularly devoted to denying ourselves those things that give us pleasure. Beloved books, such as works by Roald Dahl, have been revised in accordance with the standards of political correctness; major movies, among them works by Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, have sat unreleased as atonement for their makers’ sins. Even a sexy holiday song that was for decades a source of uncomplicated fun is not exempt: Remember the attempted cancellation of Frank Loesser’s pop standard “Baby It’s Cold Outside”?
Among the simplest pleasures to have been revoked during the present madness is the grand old tradition of the teen sex comedy. Once, high school horniness was tolerated in the same manner as middle-aged weariness or elderly orneriness: not exactly commendable but a fact of life. Hollywood saw dollar signs. In the early 1980s, films like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last American Virgin, and Risky Business both lampooned and validated the shenanigans of high schoolers. Hormones being what they are, the genre persisted well into the 21st century. Think American Pie and its sequels, The Girl Next Door, Superbad, and so on.
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Baked into these films is a practical (though unintentional) species of conservatism: They admit gender differences, often to preposterously exaggerated degrees, but also make allowances for the rambunctiousness, lustfulness, and stupidity of the young American male — not because such things are noble but because they are inevitable.
Happily, 32-year-old Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence is just old enough to remember the teen sex comedy before wokeness rendered it obsolete. Seeking to rekindle a healthy raunchiness on movie screens, Lawrence produced and stars in a fresh entrant in the genre, No Hard Feelings.
Lawrence is a bombshell unafraid to drop F-bombs. Her combination of soft features and hang-with-the-guys coarseness also recalls a movie star of considerably older vintage: Carole Lombard, a beauty whose reported off-screen language would have given the Production Code fits. But how do you market a teen sex comedy in an age when teenagers, by and large, seem to be prigs?
For director and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky, the answer is to write the problem into the script. Lawrence stars as Maddie Barker, a born-and-bred Long Islander, a millennial, and an all-around good-time gal. In the manner of many of her generation, she is an intrepid participant in the gig economy; she supplements a bartending job with income generated as an Uber driver. She is happy watering flowers outside her little Cape Cod-style house, hanging out with her hipster friends, and sleeping with whomever she pleases. She fulminates against the island’s invasive rich vacationers, to whom she relishes in denying service at her bar if they show up a few minutes before opening.
If Maddie represents the demographic raised on Fast Times at Ridgemont High on videotape and American Pie in theaters, 19-year-old Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman) is surely the stand-in for present-day teenagers who, if they can manage to divorce themselves from their phones, could conceivably find their way to a multiplex to see the movie. Percy is pampered in the peculiar manner of Generation Z: Coddled by a male nanny, ceaselessly monitored by his well-off Apple Watch-wearing parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti), the lad regards his pending adulthood not as an entree to freedom but an occasion for dread.
Stupnitsky’s conception of the character is inspired: Percy is too timid to operate a motor vehicle, too fearful to ride a bike without a helmet, and much too mild-mannered to find employment anywhere other than at an animal shelter. Whatever aggression he has is channeled into video games; predictably, he has been admitted to Princeton, a safe space for someone who has known nothing but safe spaces.
Maddie is drawn into Percy’s orbit after his parents make a rather desperate last-minute bid to put some hair on his chest: In a flagrant misuse of Craigslist, Laird and Allison post an ad soliciting a young woman to “date” their son with the promise of a free car. It’s sufficient incentive for Maddie, whose own vehicle has been repossessed following her failure to pay property taxes. “I’ve had one-night stands before and haven’t gotten any Buick Regals out of them,” Maddie says in an example of the sort of impossible dialogue that Lawrence can deliver breathlessly and unblinkingly.
Stupnitsky gets much comic mileage out of contrasting the agreeably louche Maddie with the insufferable nouveau riche Beckers, who live in an appalling example of modern architecture and speak in the cautious language of respectable arrivistes everywhere. “I just want you to know I have the utmost respect for sex workers,” Laird tells Maddie, who laughs off the insinuation that she is a prostitute. “He’s not gay?” Maddie asks of her hosts’ son while freely munching on their bowl of nachos. No, Allison insists, because she is familiar with his internet history: “The porn is graphic but not gay.”
Having won the assignment to seduce Percy in exchange for a subpar American-made car, Maddie proceeds to subject the celibate whiner to an unceasing series of come-ons, an unwieldy lap dance, and a disastrous attempt at skinny-dipping. Not all of these scenes are winners, but Lawrence marches through each with a spirit of raunchy gusto that is contagious. She is unapologetic and unafraid. Lawrence also manages to make Maddie both 10 steps ahead of Percy (when she orders him a Long Island iced tea, he assumes that it is, in fact, a tea-based beverage) and 15 steps behind him (commenting on the artwork on his T-shirt, she assumes anime is synonymous with cartoons).
At its heart, No Hard Feelings is a generation gap comedy whose appeal rests on an A-list movie star calling out the excesses of the times. When Maddie crashes a high school party, she interrupts two guys recording selfie videos warning against the dangers of bullying; when they turn their phones on her in an attempted doxxing, she flips them off. It is heartening to suppose that Lawrence, as a producer and prime mover behind the movie, might in real life echo Maddie’s eye-rolling incredulity at these children today.
As presented in the film, Maddie might be considered the latest incarnation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, an archetypal male fantasy figure in many contemporary movies. Yet details matter: Lawrence is droll, not manic; big and broad-shouldered, not pixie-ish; and a maneater, not a dream girl. (The Hall and Oates song of that title figures in the story.)
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No Hard Feelings errs in insisting that Maddie must learn a lesson or two from Percy, who is hardly an oracle of wisdom; the character becomes tolerable only thanks to Maddie’s no-nonsense sexual forwardness. This maudlin turn is unworthy of a spiritual successor to Porky’s, but Lawrence is clearly pushing the right buttons. Laughably, the film has already been accused in Bust of celebrating a “groomer,” and co-star Feldman felt the need to explain to The Independent that the movie “never condones the things that Jennifer’s character does or my character’s parents do. … You’re meant to sit with those uncomfortable feelings” — which is just the sort of self-serious pearl-clutching Lawrence is inveighing against.
“The reason you haven’t found anyone is because all young girls are idiots,” Maddie flatly tells the Beckers during their first meeting — and how right she is. Confident, coarse, and whip-smart, Lawrence has taken it upon herself to goad a humorless generation into having some fun again. What if she succeeds?
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.