93 min | R | May 26, 2023 | A24
Beth writes a novel and a husband who says he loves it. Then she overhears Don tell the truth, and the marriage she trusted turns to sand. A small lie detonates a whole life.
Beth is a writer with one well-reviewed memoir and a struggling second book. Her husband Don is a therapist losing his grip on his own patients. They have built a marriage on small kindnesses and white lies. Then Beth overhears Don admit he does not like her new manuscript. Nicole Holofcener’s film is not about that lie. It is about what we owe the people we love and whether honesty and love can survive in the same room.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth as a woman whose entire sense of self rests on one comforting fiction. She lets the betrayal register as physical nausea before it becomes anger. Tobias Menzies plays Don with the weary defensiveness of a man who meant no harm and cannot understand the wreckage. Michaela Watkins plays Beth’s sister Sarah, an interior decorator drowning in clients she despises, and the two actresses build a sibling shorthand that feels lived in. Arian Moayed and Owen Teague fill out the family as the husband and the adult son, and Jeannie Berlin plays the aging mother whose casual cruelty explains where Beth’s insecurity began.
Holofcener writes and directs with an ear for the way affluent New Yorkers wound each other in complete sentences. She stages the central eavesdropping in a clothing store and lets the camera hold on Louis-Dreyfus’s face while the dialogue keeps going. The film favors flat, even lighting and unfussy two-shots that keep the actors in the same frame during arguments. There is no score pushing the emotion. The comedy comes from the editing rhythm, from cutting away one beat before a character can recover.
This is a film about the lies that keep relationships standing and what happens when one of them gives way. Holofcener refuses to treat Beth’s crisis as either trivial or tragic. She finds the precise middle register where a marriage can be both fundamentally sound and built on a fib. The film ends without pretending the question is solved. It only admits that everyone is performing for everyone, and that the performance is sometimes the kindest thing on offer.