Jennifer Lawrence Thinks No Hard Feelings Will Offend You & That's A Good Thing
In a cinema landscape dominated by sprawling superhero flicks, overused IP, and corporate product biopics, the studio raunch-com has been relegated to the back of the class. It seems like only yesterday that Judd Apatow and pre-"Joker" Todd Philips' dick joke-laden works reigned supreme. Jennifer Lawrence is hoping to bring back that energy with her new film, "No Hard Feelings."
The "Hunger Games" star, who also serves as a producer, stars as Maddie, a down-on-her-luck 30-something enlisted to corrupt the naive, 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Her recruiters are Percy's wealthy helicopter parents, hoping their son will gain some crucial life experience before heading off to Princeton.
The R-rated "No Hard Feelings" harkens back to the sex comedies of yore, and as such, it's unabashedly raunchy and, Lawrence says, offensive.
"I think it's time for just a good old-fashioned laugh, and it really is hard to make a comedy where you're not offending people," she told Sky News. She cheekily assured audiences that when it comes to the blue dialogue and ribald humor of "No Hard Feelings," she's an equal opportunity offender. "Everybody in some sense will be offended by this film — you're welcome."
Lawrence says the film is offensive, but it doesn't punch down
Over time, audiences' sensitivities – and comedic sensibilities — have changed. That's unequivocally for the best, and comedies these days are littered with far fewer occurrences of slurs and casual racism that would make modern audiences squirm. For Andrew Barth Feldman, "No Hard Feelings" manages to push the envelope in a tactful way.
"We need to be able to engage with being offended," Feldman said in the same conversation with Sky News. "There was and is like a big overcorrect because we realized there were so many things that we were joking about that we shouldn't be." "No Hard Feelings," he says, mindfully undoes some of that overcorrection. "I think this movie does a really good job of continuing to push limits while still engaging with the conversation that the things that these people are doing are wrong, and not a good idea."
Jennifer Lawrence agrees that there's a fine line between being provocative and punching down. "Something we learned from the old-time comedies is mean comedy is not really funny," she added. Unless, of course, the subject being punched down is her. "You know, making somebody feel bad about themselves — other than me making fun of me. But the way that we did it is fine, we figured it out."