No prizes for ‘No Hard Feelings'

   

    With or without clothes, Jennifer Lawrence knows how to hold the screen. 

    And, yes, newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman makes a fine teenage foil for Lawrence’s character in No Hard Feelings. 

    Comedies are nothing without contrivance, but some contrivances are better than others, and No Hard Feelings can’t parley a sex-worker premise into a consistently winning entertainment.

     Lawrence plays a down-on-her luck resident of Montauk, Long Island who answers an ad placed by two affluent parents. These overly involved parents want their son to loosen up (i.e., lose his virginity) prior to leaving for his freshman year at Princeton.

    Heaven forbid a shy but bright kid arrive at Princeton equipped only to learn something.

     Employing her substantial gifts for physical comedy, Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a woman who hates watching wealthy visitors invade her hometown, a seaside heaven that once welcomed folks who weren't seven-figure earners.

     A remnant of older days,  Maddie has fallen behind in her taxes, and might lose the house her late mother left her. 

     She’s desperate when she sees the ad that sets the plot in motion. Wanted: a young woman to help break through the shell of inhibited 19-year-old kid. If she succeeds, Maddie will be given a Buick Regal, a car that might save her career as an Uber driver.

    In the movie's opening scene, a tow-truck driving former boyfriend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) reposes Maddie's car.

     About those clothes. In a night-time skinny dipping scene, Lawrence does full-frontal nudity as she races from the ocean to confront pranksters who threaten to steal her clothes, as well as the clothes of Feldman’s Percy.

      Necessary? Not really. Maybe it's meant to impress us with its boldness.

      Although most of the movie revolves around 32-year-old Maddie and her relationship with Percy, a small supporting cast doesn't have much to do.

     Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick play Percy’s parents. Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur portray Maddie’s friends.

      It’s pretty easy to guess what’s going to happen. What starts as a crass plunge into sex work for the intimacy-averse Maddie softens as she develops a genuine fondness for Percy, a kid who doesn't want to have sex with someone he doesn't really know.

      Despite a formulaic backdrop, No Hard Feelings, which was directed by Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), occasionally detours into moments that feel genuine and Lawrence makes sure that Maddie barges her way through all manner of difficulties. 

     A few moments suggest what might have been. When Percy plays piano and sings his version of Hall & Oates' Maneater, the movie takes a welcome and unexpected turn.

     Some of the movie’s comic high points (Percy riding naked on the hood of a car, for example) strain to be funny, raunchy and memorable. They miss the mark. 

     Too often, No Hard Feelings follows suit. It's not as bad as you might have feared given its premise nor as good as you might have hoped. I guess that adds up to a fair to middling effort.

Billy Crystal tackles aging, dementia

    In Here Today, Billy Crystal plays a comedy writer who’s beginning to suffer the effects of dementia. To compensate, Crystal’s Charlie Burnz follows the same route to his office every day, reminding himself what to do at every turn. If he diverges, he's lost.

   He’s increasingly forgetful and some of his colleagues on a cable show that resembles Saturday Night Live think he's lost his edge.

  Crystal, who also directs and who co-wrote the script with Alan Zweibel, gets to the heart of the story when Charlie meets Emma Payge. (Tiffany Haddish).

   Emma's former boyfriend won a lunch with Charlie, one of his idols,  at a charity auction. An angry Emma shows up instead. Before the lunch, she never even heard of Charlie.

   During lunch,  Emma has an alarming and not especially funny allergic reaction to a seafood salad and must be rushed to a nearby hospital. Charlie generously pays her medical bills. 

     No charity case, Emma pays Charlie back in installments, providing an opportunity for the two to become real friends.

     Later -- to demonstrate the closeness of their bond -- Charlie and Emma even spoon (their word) a little. Of course, they don't push toward anything more serious than a comforting cuddle. And, no, I can't think of the last time I heard the word "spooning" used by anyone.

    It's difficult to imagine that a movie such as Here Today won't step  into puddles of sentiment. It does.

    Recurrent flashbacks show Charlie's relationship with his beloved wife (Louisa Krause), who's seen mostly in the prime of her youth.

    Like many who face their final days, Charlie wants to make things right with his grown children: a resentful daughter (Laura Benanti) and a son (Penn Badgley) who thinks Dad doesn't value his work as a budding architect. 

     Broad comedy sometimes swamps sentiment. The movie puts a lot of energy into a scene in which Emma accompanies Charlie to his granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. She commandeers the mic, delivers her version of Janis Joplin's Piece of My Heart, and gets everybody moving on the dance floor.

     Scenes at the show where Charlie works made me wonder whether the entire movie shouldn't have taken place in that environment. He may be an ancient in a world full of young comics but Charlie knows that many of them greatly overestimate their talents.

     It's nearly impossible to watch Crystal without smiling, which makes the movie’s obvious contrivances feel less brittle. In Haddish, he's found a gutsy actress willing to dive into the movie's more improbable moments without blinking.

     Odd-couple sparks aside, Here Today carries the weight of genre  shtick that's older than Crystal and Haddish put together: You’ll laugh.  You’ll cry. That sort of thing.

     I did laugh a few times. And I felt Charlie’s pain when he couldn't remember the names of celebrities at a Lincoln Center panel honoring one the films he'd written. Did I cry? Not even close.

     In short, my heart was not warmed as surely was intended. Still, I'm happy to report that my fondness for both performers remains undiminished.