Gene Stupnitsky makes crude comedies about people who cannot quite manage adulthood. We like his sympathy for their confusion, but his films become less funny when he starts reassuring us that everyone means well.
Fi1m perspective
Jennifer Lawrence throws herself into the physical comedy of No Hard Feelings (2023), while the script keeps finding reasons to go gently. That mismatch tells us a fair amount about Gene Stupnitsky as a director. He likes crude jokes and the people caught up in them, but he can be too protective of the latter. We laughed at Lawrence falling off things; her commitment to looking ridiculous gives those jokes the nerve the writing too often lacks.
Stupnitsky worked as a writer and episode director on The Office (2005), alongside Lee Eisenberg. Our enthusiasm for that series rests on Steve Carell's needy boss and a cast worth spending time with; it cannot all be credited to one writer. Feature screenplays for Year One (2009) and Bad Teacher (2011) came before his feature directing debut, Good Boys (2019). There, the gap between innocent faces and filthy dialogue supplies the joke, without the apologetic fuss of his next film.
In No Hard Feelings, Stupnitsky and co-writer John Phillips set up a grown woman being paid to seduce a teenager, then keep reassuring us that the arrangement is less troubling than it sounds. Maddie's tax bills and the summer people buying up her town get little attention. Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur, playing her friends, are largely there to tell her what she is doing wrong. Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Gary is the funniest supporting character, yet gets only a few minutes. These are writing decisions that leave good comic actors with too little to do and the central situation softened before it can become properly uncomfortable.
Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman make a likeable pair, and Stupnitsky deserves credit for keeping their performances grounded within an ungainly setup. Their company makes the sweetness welcome, even when the script's efforts to excuse the characters become tiresome. That distinction matters for a director whose interest in people's confusion is often more promising than the familiar situations he puts them in. For No Hard Feelings, bring an appetite for physical comedy and modest expectations of the script.
Biography
Gene Stupnitsky is a Ukrainian-born American writer, producer and director. Born on 26 August 1977 in Kyiv, he moved to the United States as an infant and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 2000.
He frequently collaborates with Lee Eisenberg, with whom he co-founded Quantity Entertainment. From 2005 to 2010 Stupnitsky worked as a writer, producer and director on the NBC sitcom The Office, earning three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He co-created the HBO series Hello Ladies (2013–2014) and the Amazon Freevee series Jury Duty (2023), the latter of which won a Peabody Award.
Stupnitsky wrote the screenplays for Year One (2009) and Bad Teacher (2011). He made his feature directorial debut with Good Boys (2019) and co-wrote and directed No Hard Feelings (2023).
