Perhaps if there is one key aim of No Hard Feelings (apart from being 2023’s answer to a “sex” comedy), it’s to highlight the flaccidity of a generation. While millennials endured their fair share of being called “snowflakes,” that derisive epithet has shifted squarely onto the shoulders of Gen Z—tenfold. Particularly as their “kind” is the first to be known for having less sex than their forebears. Not so coincidentally, the documented decline in mental health seems to have coincided with the documented decline in an interest in sex. Based on what we see in Gene Stupnitsky’s latest film, it’s clear Gen Z’s sanity and self-confidence could be greatly boosted if they seemed to better understand what Alex Comfort would call the joy of sex.
Alas, for Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman), that understanding is a long way off. “Luckily,” there to nudge it along are what the movie’s summary bills as his “helicopter parents,” Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti). Though, if we’re venturing out of millennial territory, the more appropriate term for what Gen Z has are lawnmower parents. A breed that, although similar to the hovering-over-every-action helicopter parents, actually goes so far as to mow down every obstacle in their children’s way. Which has been the case for Percy his entire life. This being the driving force behind why they post a Craigslist ad (again, a very millennial medium) seeking a girl in her early to mid-twenties to “date” their son—the running joke of a euphemism that the audience is meant to easily interpret as “fuck.” In other words, they want someone to “date the shit out of” their son so that he’ll finally come out of his shell. The little sexually awkward hermit crab that he is.
At the same time, Maddie Barker’s (Jennifer Lawrence) circumstances have aligned to become the lone “girl” who might take the ad seriously/be up for what it requires (that is to say, actually “opening Percy up”). For, as the movie commences with one of her many exes pulling up to her house in Montauk (because yes, this is the first real “Montauk movie”—unless one counts Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), it’s apparent that things are financially dire. Confirmed by that ex, Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), also happening to be a tow truck driver who has been tasked with repossessing her car.
Freaking out about losing a key source of her additional income (being an Uber driver does, to be sure, require a car), Maddie proceeds to funnel her rage toward the “summer people” that have been ruining Montauk for true locals for decades. And if you were wondering how she herself got her cush abode, it belonged to her mother…who got it, in turn, as a form of “hush property” from Maddie’s absentee father. A man who had an affair with Maddie’s mother while keeping his “real family” in the city. This is the type of complicated quagmire a cocooned, affluent Gen Zer like Percy could never understand. And yet, Maddie goes into the job under the misguided notion that she can treat a member of Gen Z anything close to how she would a millennial. Because, though the years that separate the generations aren’t that many, the divide is vast.
Take, for instance, Maddie’s initial approach to Percy, instructed by his parents to manufacture a “meet cute” with him at the animal shelter where he volunteers. Percy conveniently happens to be holding a wiener dog in his arms so that Maddie can deliver the solid-gold line, “Can I touch your wiener?” Percy is more frazzled than aroused by Maddie’s sexed-up appearance and subtle-as-a-car-crash flirting techniques. And that feeling only intensifies when, in his mind, it seems as though Maddie is trying to kidnap him when she offers to give him a ride home.
Ending up at her house instead, Percy sprays her in the face with pepper spray as she demands, “Why couldn’t you have used your rape whistle instead?” “Why would I have a rape whistle?” he replies. She tells him that the better question is, why would he have mace? The answer, needless to say, is that this lily-livered generation is so afraid of their own shadow, so riddled with the anxieties of potential danger lurking everywhere that of course they wouldn’t leave the house unarmed. If they leave the house at all. Percy certainly never seems to. Until Maddie comes along. Because, quelle surprise, in spite of the mace snafu, Percy is coerced into asking her on a date.
When Maddie arranges for him to meet her at the bar she usually frequents, it results in not only running into yet another one of her “exes” (i.e., flings), but a discussion about what Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” is actually saying. All Percy knows is, the lyrical content terrified him as a child. While he took the description more literally to mean some kind of monster only comes out at night, Maddie breaks it to him that, no, that’s not what the song is about. Though, to be fair, it’s not really about a sexually appetitive woman either, with John Oates explaining that it’s actually about “NYC in the 80s. It’s about greed, avarice, and spoiled riches. But we have it in the setting of a girl because it’s more relatable. It’s something that people can understand.” Unless they’re Percy or any other Gen Z male, who doesn’t know the first thing about how to “activate” a woman (that said, in a pre-Gen Z era of movies, Percy probably would have just been written off as gay as opposed to “emotionally delicate”).
Nonetheless, Maddie performs every cliché trick in the book to entice him, still not yet registering that he needs to be “dealt with” in a manner that speaks his own sexually repressed language. Before Maddie realizes that, she wastes her time seducing him with the millennial classic known as Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” complete with booty-popping that ultimately falls on blind eyes as he comments on how she feels a little heavy on his legs. Although one would think their total lack of sexual chemistry might have put Percy off of Maddie by now (whereas Maddie has no choice but to stay the course if she wants her vehicular compensation), the reality is, she’s the form of connection he’s been craving. Isolating himself from his peers after transferring to a new school in the wake of a nasty rumor about how he has sex with his parents (this snowballing from the fact that he still slept in the same room as them now and again), Percy has deliberately kept his distance from others. Chosen to blend in to avoid being noticed, therefore perceived and judged at all.
Despite Maddie and Percy’s generational divide, this is one thing they can easily relate to with each other: putting up walls to keep anyone from getting too close. Granted, Maddie at least has an age-appropriate best friend named Sarah (Natalie Morales), who comes as a set with her boyfriend/soon-to-be father of her child, Jim (Scott MacArthur). In fact, they’re the ones who urged her to respond to the Craigslist ad in the first place. What with the payment just so happening to be the car replacement she needs to keep working her side hustle (heaven forbid the payment could be actual, real money; rich people, after all, only keep their wealth by not sharing it in any profound way).
By the end of that first date, though, Maddie is wishing she never bothered as she’s forced to take matters into her own hands when a group of teenagers steal their clothes from the beach (somehow, she had managed to convince Percy to go skinny dipping with her). Because, obviously, Percy isn’t going to do a thing to stop them—a point she calls out when he gets “spooked” by how she attacked them while completely naked (this patently being part of a CGI wonder). Berating him for being incapable of taking action or making decisions for himself without the presumed sanction of an “adult” (she reminds him that he’s one, too), she finally tells him that she feels sorry for him. As it is easy to do for a generation that grew up so fundamentally sheltered despite being exposed to just about every depraved thing imaginable through the lens of a screen (read: the internet).
And part of that pity flares up again toward the end of the movie’s second act, as Maddie goes from room to room at a rich person’s house party in search of Percy, seeing that, in each one, the youths are doing nothing more than frittering the time away on their phones or with a VR headset. So frustrated by the sight of such flaccidity (which has been compounded by her weeks spent with Percy), she finally cries out, “Doesn’t anyone fuck anymore?” The answer clearly being a resounding no. Not even in a sex comedy. For, expectedly, when Maddie and Percy finally do “consummate” their relationship, the visual result is even more lackluster than one would expect.
Regardless, No Hard Feelings has been celebrated as an “old-school raunch fest with plenty of laughs.” Yet it’s apparent that the movie isn’t exactly that at all. For it knows it can’t dare to go in the same territory as erstwhile benchmarks of previous raunch comedies like, say, Porky’s. Or even Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds. All of which focus on male teens at a time when they weren’t all so, well, incel-esque.
As a member of Gen X, Stupnitsky (who cowrote the script with John Phillips) perhaps not only possesses a different layer of objectivity regarding the dynamic between millennials and Gen Zers who are even less physically and emotionally equipped than the former, but also certainly understands the finer points of malaise and suffering (being Ukrainian helps with that, too). All while managing to incorporate sex (or the “suggestion” of it) into that cocktail of growing pains misery. Because sex is what helps keep most people from going completely insane. That is, most people who aren’t part of Gen Z. But the lack of intense interest in it on their part is built into the title—having no hard feelings (a.k.a. erections) because it’s difficult to do that when all feelings whatsoever are numbed out to begin with.
Does No Hard Feelings go to the same lengths of raunch in getting that message across as Fast Times at Ridgemont High or There’s Something About Mary, or even Superbad? No. But such are the fragile Gen Z-geared times we live in.
