Tropic Sprockets / You Hurt My Feelings

By Ian Brockway

Nicole Holofcener (Please Give) directs a family comedy-drama that has a Seinfeld-ish tone. It’s breezy with insightful commentary. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the center of this film, holding it all together. [Check Tropiccinema.com for showtimes and trailer.]

Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) is a troubled memoirist trying to make it as a fiction writer. She spends her day knocking books aside and putting her book up front and center. Otherwise, she goes to lunch and volunteers at a homeless shelter.

Beth’s husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is a psychiatrist just going through the motions. He talks to patients as they go through bickering revolutions.

One day, Beth goes to lunch with her friend Sarah (Michaela Watkins), and she overhears Don telling his friend that he doesn’t care for Beth’s new mystery novel even though he has read it several times over. Beth becomes nauseous thinking that their relationship is false and dishonest. 

Holofcener executes the semi-comic tone well and the jokes are easy and pleasing.

While the psychiatry segments feel inspired by Comedy Central’s “Dr Katz,” they still get a chuckle or two.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is entertaining also because she plays a self-centered character on one hand while trying to be generous underneath. Refreshingly, she is not Elaine Benes here, but she can deliver the laughs in the conceits of everyday life and its missteps.

Beth and Don are not the most colorful of couples, yet the comedy still retains a theatrical edge given Don’s cosmetic eyelid surgery.

This is not daring storytelling, but it is authentic. The conclusion is casual and understated, but the foibles contained in this metropolitan New York Family are both entertaining and endearing.

Nicole Holofcener delivers a light touch in this film, but the truths revealed carry real existence from the perspectives of mature women.

Write Ian at [email protected]

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]