'No Hard Feelings' Is a Perfect Reintroduction to Jennifer Lawrence
No Hard Feelings stars Jennifer Lawrence as someone we’ve never seen her play before: herself. Kind of.
True, unlike Maddie, her character in No Hard Feelings, the actual Jennifer Lawrence is not a down-on-her-luck Uber driver fighting to save her house in Montauk from tourists and tax assessors. She has an Oscar; she’s doing fine.
But Lawrence is also not Katniss Everdeen, or a lonely teen skinning squirrels in Appalachia, or a widow entering a ballroom dancing competition. No Hard Feelings offers nothing more gimmicky than a nude wrestling match on the beach, and nothing even approaching Oscar bait. With the trappings of special effects and prestige gleam stripped away, we can finally see Lawrence again—and remember why we loved her.
When Lawrence rose to A-plus-plus-list-level fame in the 2010s, there was no such thing as TikToks about parasocial relationships. But countless people certainly had one with her. Her celebrity persona was as appealing as her talent: the gorgeous young woman in a designer dress, making poop jokes and contorted faces. She won an Oscar, but ate shit on the way up to accept the award. She was a movie star, but an approachable one—somebody who inspired think pieces about just why she was so appealing.
But as Lawrence’s profile got bigger, the onscreen roles she took seemed increasingly at odds with her off-screen goofiness. Jennifer Lawrence saves the world! Jennifer Lawrence goes to space! She was piled with makeup and period costume, with unthinkable tragedies and dilemmas thrown at her characters’ feet. And the films she made—movies like Joy, Passengers, and Dark Phoenix—were being ignored or derided rather than embraced.
Meanwhile, that off-screen goofiness had started to grate on certain audiences, creating a feedback loop that Lawrence could feel, but couldn’t figure a way out of. “It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right,” Lawrence said in her 2021 Vanity Fair cover profile. “If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’… I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”
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But while Maddie isn’t Lawrence, and Lawrence isn’t Maddie, she’s a fantastic reintroduction to the actor. Director David O. Russell was famous for casting Lawrence as characters she was logically way too young to play, in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy. But in No Hard Feelings, we finally get to see the actor playing her own age, 32. (Or, as her character puts it: She “turned 29…last year…two years ago.”) She also gets to throw herself wholeheartedly into the physical comedy she excels at. (Nobody gets maced for laughs like Jennifer Lawrence, and let’s not even talk about that throat punch.) At the same time, she’s delivering a dramatic performance that rings true. As it turns out, you don’t need to be so serious to be taken seriously.
Maybe if that script Lawrence said she was writing with Amy Schumer back in the day—a comedy starring the two as sisters that Schumer described as “funny,” “dirty,” and “real”—had come to fruition, we could have seen this side of Lawrence on the big screen sooner. Maybe the success of a Lawrence-starring straight comedy (unlike the knowing satire of 2021’s Don’t Look Up) and her producing arm means the script will resurface and we’ll finally get to see it. Better late than never. In the meantime, No Hard Feelings feels like a movie that Lawrence would actually want to watch; she’s having fun, and it shows.
No Hard Feelings can also be read as a reclamation of sorts. In 2014, Lawrence was among a group of celebrities whose information was hacked, and nude photos of her were posted online without her permission. A few months after the crime, she told Vanity Fair that she’d thought about making a statement, but nothing felt right or fair. “I started to write an apology, but I don’t have anything to say I’m sorry for,” she said. It was a violation.
In No Hard Feelings, Lawrence is nude during the aforementioned beach ass-whooping—a shocking moment in the age of careful cut-arounds and implied nudity. When her private photos were hacked, Lawrence told VF, she felt “like a piece of meat that’s being passed around for a profit.” Now the nudity is coming on her own terms. Lawrence is a producer of No Hard Feelings; nobody bullied her into making this scene. She’s fully naked, she’s pissed, and she looks strong.
Even off-screen, Lawrence seems to be thriving in her new freedom to be goofy. At the film’s New York premiere, she stopped by the overflow theater where lowly members of the press, myself included, were watching the film, far removed from all the glam down the hall. “Enjoy da mooooovie!” she bellowed over her shoulder in a silly voice as she exited the theater and the lights went down.
Certainly, there’s no question about whether Lawrence enjoyed it.
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