A few days ago, I wanted to watch a movie after coming home from my World Peace Prayer meeting at the Buddhist Center. I turned on Oppenheimer and tried to finish, but my heart was beating out of my chest while watching because it was just getting really intense and disturbing (then again, it’s about the man who commissioned the atomic bomb that killed a bunch of innocent civilians, so of course it’s going to be intense and disturbing.) It’s definitely an important film to watch, but it’s kind of like my experience with watching Killers of the Flower Moon. I had to watch that movie in bite sized pieces because it was pretty disturbing, and each time I tried to get through the three-hour movie I broke down crying because I hadn’t really studied about the Osage murders, so seeing Ernest Burkhart and his uncle commit these horrific crimes against the Osage Nation was pretty, well, horrifying.
So, I decided to take a break from Oppenheimer and watch something else (I will come back to it, just need a break for a bit.) While driving around the city last year I saw bulletin boards for a movie called No Hard Feelings, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman. I don’t normally watch sex comedies (I thought it had to do with my asexuality, but I’m sure there are a lot of asexual people who watch porn and sexual content, so I can only speak from my own experience as an asexual person), so this was kind of new movie territory for me, but it’s actually a pretty sweet film. It takes place in Montauk, New York, and Jennifer Lawrence plays a 32-year-old woman named Maddie whose life isn’t working out. She works as an Uber driver and a waitress but is barely getting by financially. She doesn’t have a lot of close romantic relationships and also, she is going to get evicted from her home (and lose her car) due to the rising cost of living in Montauk. Lucky for her, Maddie finds an advertisement by a wealthy couple who needs a woman to date and have sex with their 19-year-old son, Percy, who is socially awkward and a virgin. Maddie comes over to their very affluent home, struggling to get up the steps in her roller skates (since her car got repossessed, she has to go everywhere in roller skates,) and has an initial interview with Percy’s parents, Laird and Alison. Laird and Alison explain to Maddie that they want their son to learn how to socialize, date and have sex before he goes to Princeton University so that he comes out of his shell and doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb in college. At first, Maddie tries to flirt and be sexually attractive to him, but Percy doesn’t really want to have sex right away, he just wants someone to hang out with. Through their relationship, the two of them learn a lot about each other. Maddie realizes that she was in a lot of these relationships where she wasn’t emotionally available to the men she was with, and so these exes would come back in her life and tell her how much she hurt them. Percy realizes that he doesn’t need to change himself to fit in as a college student, and he can be himself. Maddie also realizes that she can be herself in her relationship with Percy. They end up developing a really sweet romance and friendship together.
There were a few scenes that I remember from the film that stuck out to me. One scene was when Perry and Maddie are at a nice restaurant eating out on their date, and Perry plays the piano for everyone. Earlier in the movie, Percy and Maddie are at a bar and they hear the song “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. Later, in the scene where they are on their date, Perry opens up to Maddie about how he plays music, and Maddie tells him she wants to hear him playing. Perry is reluctant at first, but then he gives in and ends up singing a beautiful rendition of “Maneater.” Maddie is smitten and mesmerized, and so is everyone in the restaurant. Maddie tells him how incredible his performance is, but then Natalie, a girl that Percy goes to high school with, comes up to him and the two of them hug. Maddie is wondering, Who on Earth is this Natalie girl? The girl and Percy gush about how they are both going to Princeton next year, and Maddie becomes jealous. She tries to interrupt the conversation and get the girl away from Percy, but Percy ends up getting angry with Maddie for reacting like that, and they end up riding home in silence. Percy also overhears that Maddie only came by because his parents wanted her to hook up with him, and he feels crushed and thinks that Maddie didn’t genuinely love him. While at breakfast with his parents and Maddie, he drinks a lot of wine and calls them out for what they did and with his friend, who he works with at the animal shelter, he proceeds to destroy Maddie’s new car. He ends up feeling terrible about it later and he and Maddie have a huge argument, and she leaves. They end up making up, though, and Maddie also experiences a new life change and decides to move to California. She and Percy share a bittersweet farewell, but she drives him to the airport.
I really love Jennifer Lawrence in this role. I normally have seen her in drama films like The Hunger Games and American Hustle, but she was really good in this movie. I first saw the trailer and thought the film would be too silly for me, but it was actually a really touching story. Of course, this film sparked a lot of necessary discussion around age-gap relationships because Maddie is much older than Percy, and that’s a fair discussion to have because it is an uncomfortable subject. But also, I know a lot of age-gap relationships in real life (not personally, but I know celebrities who are in relationships with significant age-gaps), and honestly, I don’t really know what side to take on this subject. I was reading on Buzzfeed about how the filmmakers and cast addressed the huge age-gap between Maddie and Percy, and one of the cast members noted that the film also says a lot about helicopter parenting, because Percy’s parents were very protective of him and they feared that he wouldn’t survive college if he didn’t know how to hook up or socialize, so instead of giving Percy space to figure all this stuff out on his own in college, they tried to control and intervene, so they set him up with Maddie. However, Percy still didn’t want to rush into anything, and in the end Percy’s parents eventually just had to trust that their son was going to be okay and that sometimes he was going to have to make his own decisions and figure stuff out on his own. I’m not a parent, so I can’t imagine how hard it is for them to watch their son grow up and leave, but it must be hard. I remember when I went off to college, I was super excited, but then I was really homesick and stressed. But thankfully while I was away, I had my local Buddhist community and often went to meetings and to chant with other members. I didn’t really want to go to parties, and I wasn’t really interested in dating, so going to Buddhist meetings was one of the ways I had fun. Even though I still asked my parents for advice while away from home, I often would try to figure stuff out on my own. Of course, in college there were some things that I shouldn’t have tried to do on my own, like battling clinical depression and not telling anyone. But the experiences of having a roommate, having a campus job and being responsible for your decisions (i.e. should I go to work or call in sick? Should I eat vegan chocolate sheet cake at every meal or eat it sparingly? Should I drink Sleepy Time tea before class or wait until it’s my bedtime to drink it? Should I spend all the disposable income from my campus dishwasher job on snacks from CVS or save it to pay off my imminent student loans? Spoiler: I waited until after college to do the latter. I loved my snacks) really taught me about resilience and emotional maturity. Making my own decisions while away from my parents was challenging, but at this time I ended up making friends in my own unique way. I honestly didn’t know if I was going to make friends in college, especially as an introvert, but I ended up meeting a lot of people and making connections with people in my own unique way. I didn’t have a Facebook account during my first three years of college, but most people didn’t mind that I didn’t have an account, and we still saw each other on campus. It was a little lonely missing out on inside jokes and people’s posts on their Facebook walls, but I think looking back, I still managed to make a lot of genuine connections with people at my college. I think chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist chant I do) gave me the courage to be myself, and of course there were times in college where I struggled to feel like I was doing college the “right way” and comparing my social life with that of my peers, but as I continued my Buddhist practice, I began to connect with people in a very natural way and I even got to tell them about my Buddhist practice. That was a tangent from talking about the movie, but I just thought of my own experience with being in college when I saw Percy leaving for Princeton.
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