No Hard Feelings: A Strangely Sexless Sex Comedy

American teenagers in the age of the iPhone are exceedingly well behaved. They don’t fight, they don’t drink or drive drunk or really drive that much at all, and they definitely don’t have sex.

I’m generalizing, don’t hit me with a fact check. But the trend line is real — and the last trend, toward greater chastity, matches the long-held desires of social and religious conservatism. If you had told an Evangelical activist or a Catholic moralist in the early 1990s that by 2020 less than 40 percent of American teens would be sexually active (the rate was 55 percent back then), they would have probably assumed that this was part of a renewed cultural commitment to courtship, chivalry, monogamy, and marriage.

This is sadly not the case. Instead, today’s “sex recession” is also a dating recession, a marriage recession, and a fertility recession — all part of a general, technology-mediated retreat from human interaction that appears to be making young Americans miserable as well as decorous, depressed as well as docile.

Which places cultural conservatives in an odd position, looking back over the sexual revolution’s Dionysian phase and the sterility that’s followed. Given a choice, should we prefer the years of lust to the age of acedia? A world of higher divorce rates to a world of unhappy singleness? An America with more teen pregnancies to an America of fewer pregnancies, period?

Or, since this is a movie column — an age of raunchy farce and big-screen nudity to an age of neutered superheroes and Disney movies that can’t even muster up a romance?

One might simply say, Neither: Give us old-fashioned romance, with sexiness achieved through sublimation, or give us nothing. But the movies are a mirror to culture, and simply going backward to the pre-sexual-revolution landscape is a bit difficult to pull off. As is going forward, from the sterile present to — well, to what?

That’s the question hanging over No Hard Feelings, on the one hand a game attempt to recapture the spirit of big-screen, big-star comedy, a spirit that somehow died completely in the last ten years . . . and on the other hand a very strange exercise, a sex comedy without real sex or romance, that has the right idea about what it’s against but no clear sense of what it should be for instead.

The setting is Montauk; our star, Jennifer Lawrence, plays Maddie, an early-30s, Uber-driving townie who finds herself in dire financial straits, unable to keep up with the taxes on her departed mother’s house — a situation that turns desperate when her car is repossessed. The solution is an advertisement offering up an automobile in exchange for what amounts to some discreet escort work. Two rich helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) are sending their prized offspring off to Princeton, and the boy, 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), has no social life, no friends, no world outside his phone and anime and porn and VR headset. So the adults have a solution: What he needs is to be dated, as Broderick’s father puts it, hard.

Any Generation Xer will note the evocations of the 1980s here. The plot bears a family resemblance to Risky Business, except there Tom Cruise’s teenage virgin was struggling to get into Princeton, not already accepted, and also for all his sexual inexperience he was, well, Tom Cruise, whereas Feldman’s Percy is a true fumbler, a black hole for sex appeal. Broderick’s presence evokes Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, complete with a similarly crucial role for a prized automobile — but with the idea that the Spirit of the Youth, circa 2023, is now the antithesis of the Ferris Bueller mentality.

It is to the movie’s moral credit, in a way, that it doesn’t simply try to return to the ’80s, to revive Dionysus with a blast of orgiastic sex. There is a nude scene for Lawrence, but it’s a comic rather than an erotic one, in which she fights a bunch of preppies who swipe her clothes during a skinny-dip; otherwise No Hard Feelings is at pains not to reproduce the Cruise–Rebecca De Mornay dynamic between its leads, or seek subplots that imitate the Porky’s franchise. It’s clearly trying to defend adulthood and reality writ large, not sex alone, against technological cocoons and safety-ism — which involves prying Lawrence’s character out of her rut of one-night stands and townie self-pity as much as it means readying Percy to go to college as an actual young man, not just an avatar in simspace.

Which is all to the good, but still, sex itself is also a part of adulthood, and it should be possible for an erotic charge to smolder somewhere (as it certainly did in Old Hollywood, without the benefit of nudity) even if you aren’t going all the way to NC-17. No Hard Feelings is very conscious of the inappropriateness of its central pairing, and also very conscious of the inappropriateness of Maddie’s random hookups, and between all that self-consciousness it never figures out a way to make heterosexual intimacy seem like something that a grown-up person might find especially attractive or desirable.

That’s an odd place for a sex comedy to falter, and though I endorse its message I can’t really endorse the movie. It’s against the spirit of the age but also trapped within it, unable to figure out how, beyond the merely explicit, a real attraction between men and women might be manifest in art.