Producers: Alex Saks, Naomi Odenkirk, Marc Provissiero, Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi   Director: Gene Stupnitsky   Screenplay: Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips   Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Hasan Minhaj, Scott MacArthur, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kyle Mooney, Zahn McClarnon, Jordan Mendoza, Amalia Yoo, Alysia Joy Powell and Quincy Dunn-Baker   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: C+

An attempt to commingle raunchiness and sweetness succeeds only sporadically in Gene Stupnitsky’s “No Hard Feelings,” a double entendre title for a movie that’s a throwback of sorts to the naughty but nice teen romps of decades past.  It benefits, however, from the pairing of Jennifer Lawrence and newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman, who manage to make their characters surprisingly likable despite the screenplay’s missteps.

The picture begins with a pretty icky premise.  A rich couple summering in Montauk, Laird and Allison Becker (Mathew Broderick and Laura Benanti), are concerned about their withdrawn, reclusive son Percy (Feldman).  He’s been accepted at Princeton for the fall, but they’re afraid that his social awkwardness will doom his chance to have a fulfilling college experience.  So they decide in effect to hire a girl to seduce him and bring him out of his shell.  They put an advertisement on the Internet, offering a car to the successful applicant if she fulfills the assignment.  It’s a set-up reminiscent of the cliché in old movies, especially Westerns, in which a macho guy took his son to a brothel so that he could “become a man” by having his initial experience of sex.  Updating it to the present somehow makes it even creepier.  

Anyway, just by accident local Maddie Barker (Lawrence) learns of the ad from her pregnant friend Sarah (Natalie Morales).  In one of the script’s clumsiest coincidences, she happens to be in desperate need of a car at the moment, hers having been impounded for back taxes at the very time she’s supplementing her bartender income as an Uber driver in order to raise the funds needed to save the house she inherited from her mother from being seized by the government too.  So she applies for the job even though at thirty-two she’s considerably older than the Beckers had envisioned.

Maddie then approaches Percy at the only place he apparently leaves the house to go—the dog-adoption service where he works as a volunteer alongside protective boss Doug (Hasan Minhaj).  Wearing a slinky dress, she comes on to Percy and insists on giving him a ride home in a van she’s borrowed from Sarah’s surfer-dude husband Jim (Scott MacArthur).  Percy’s terrified belief that she’s trying to kidnap him ends the ride with him pulling out his can of Mace, but eventually the misunderstanding is cleared up and he agrees to go out on a date with her. 

The movie alternates between rowdy sequences—Maddie futilely trying to take back the car that’s being towed away by Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), one of the guys she ghosted after a single date; Maddie getting drenched with a hose trying to get the Mace from her eyes; an evening skinny dip on the beach that leads to a fight between a naked Maddie and three drunken kids trying to steal their clothes—and simple slapstick, as when Maddie tries to negotiate the Beckers’ hillside driveway while on roller skates (why didn’t she simply take them off?), with others designed to explain her harsh personality and rejection of commitment (daddy issues) and the wall Percy’s built around himself (school bullying about his reported over-closeness with his parents). 

There are also moments designed to show Maddie’s essential soft-heartedness (her concerns about Sarah and Jim having to move for financial reasons, and the lengths to which she’ll go to help them) and how Percy has been molded into the person he is (a meeting with his aggressive ex-nanny, played by an unsettling Kyle Mooney).  And there’s, inevitably, the anger Percy feels when he finds out that his parents had hired Maddie; unfortunately, it takes the form of a car-destruction scene that feels like a “Ferris Bueller” rip-off.  But there are also occasional throwaway bits that work surprisingly well, like the reaction of Native American Zahn McClarnon, in a single-scene cameo, when Maddie complains that he doesn’t understand what it’s like having the government take your property.

In all, this is a movie that swings back and forth between attempts to be over-the-top comic and others designed to be insightful observations about the lead characters.  Fortunately Lawrence proves to be up for everything, playing even a poorly-written scene in which she’s the oldest “guest” at an incoming-freshmen Princeton party with conviction.  And newcomer Feldman is an ingratiating presence.  Looking a bit like a young Jamie Bell (think Billy Elliott with a few years added on), he endows naïve Percy with an innocence that makes you root for him.  He even manages a potentially disastrous musical scene, when he’s taken Maddie on a “prom” date (both skipped their real ones) and is prodded by her to show off his keyboard skills at a restaurant, where he undertakes a Vegas lounge-like version of “Maneater.”  As for the supporting cast, many, like MacArthur and Mooney, come off too strong, but Broderick, boasting a huge mane of greying hair (and a pretty ample stomach), goes the opposite route with a laid-back turn in which he seems utterly comfortable.

The movie is attractive visually, not just because of Lawrence but because actual New York locations are nicely used by production designer Russell Barnes and cinematographer Eigil Bryld.  Editor Brent White keeps the action moving along, and the score by Mychael Danna and Jessica Rose Weiss stays within reasonable bounds for this sort of high-concept rom-com. 

But in the final analysis “No Hard Feelings” feels ambivalent about what sort of movie it wants to be—a raunchy sex farce or a sensitive study of two troubled people whose unlikely friendship helps both overcome their problems—and in trying to be both, it seems forced and unconvincing.  Lawrence and Feldman, however, almost pull it off.

Producer: Denise Ream   Director: Peter Sohn   Screenplay: John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh Cast: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie Del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covery, Catherine O’Hara, Mason Wertheimer, Joe Pera, Matt Yang King and Ronobir Lahiri    Distributor: Disney 

Grade: C+

The images in Pixar’s newest film have a luminous beauty, but as was the case with “The Good Dinosaur” (2015), Peter Sohn’s previous feature for the studio, “Elemental” is weak in the story department.  It’s basically an odd-couple romance, with a heavy dose of immigrant-experience struggle added to the mix—a combination that’s hardly unfamiliar.

What is unusual is the locale it which the story is set—Element City, a metropolis inhabited by denizens literally made up of different elements (air, earth, fire and water, the quartet that prevailed in pre-modern thought).  The girl at the center of things is Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), whose parents Bernie Lumen (Ronnie Del Carmen) and his wife Cinder (Shila Ommi) have traveled from Fireland to make a better life for themselves.  They find that the city is semi-segregated, and their kind are concentrated in a neighborhood called Fire Town, where Bernie opens a store called Fireplace that flourishes while meeting the needs of the sometimes cantankerous locals, and Ember grows from a tyke to a young woman happily helping her dad at the counter.

But it’s a ramshackle place, and when city inspector Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) shows up to look into a leak from basement pipes that should have been shut down long ago, he begins writing up violations that threaten to shut down the business.  But he’s a goofy, apologetic fellow, obviously taken by the feistiness of the strong-willed, aggressive Ember, and he offers to help in her battle with the municipal authorities, particularly his boss (Wendi McClendon-Covery), a puffy air cloud who’s a passionate supporter of a local airball team, the Windbreakers.  She gives the duo a chance to trace the source of the water leak and make repairs to save Fireplace. 

A few representatives of Earth also feature in the movie—there’s Fern Grouchwood (Joe Pera), a fusty bureaucrat, and Clod (Mason Wertheimer), a kid in Fire Town who has a thing for Ember, but the emphasis remains on the Fire-and-Water dichotomy as the relationship between Ember and Wade deepens—Bernie and Cinder are pretty adamant in their opposition to their daughter getting involved with a Water Guy.  On the other hand, Wade’s well-to-do family—his mother Brook (Catherine O’Hara), uncle Harold (Ronobir Lahiri) and brother Alan (Matt Yang King)—are quite supportive of the duo, welcoming Ember for dinner.  Brook is also taken by Ember’s ability to melt and harden glass, which expresses her desire to become an artist rather than follow in her father’s footsteps, and is in a position to help the girl reach for her dream, much to Bernie’s distress.

The detective-work part of the couple’s growing romance gets pretty short shrift—they track down the cause of the overflowing water, and Ember uses her glass-manipulating power to fix it at least temporarily; but otherwise it’s shunted aside.  Note that there’s no malevolence involved: this is a Disney film that lacks a villain, except for bigotry.  That’s typical of the entire movie, which is based more on abstractions, as artfully personified as they might be, than on individuals. 

Yet the personifications are beautifully rendered.  The dancing orange flickers that make up the Fire folk and the shimmering blue motions of the Water people are lovely, and while the other two kinds of element-based citizens are less imaginatively rendered (cotton-candy fluffs for the air types, brown clumps with leaves and branches for the earthy types), the backgrounds are astonishingly colorful.  And Sohn inserts a big set-piece to allow for a special explosion of the animator’s craft—a visit Wade arranges for Ember to an underwater garden where she can finally see the legendary tree of life she was prevented from viewing as a child. 

Yet in the end despite the remarkable work of animation supervisors Michael Venturini, Kureha Yokoo and their team, visual effects supervisor Sanjay Bakshi and his, production designer Don Shank, cinematographers David Juan Bianchi and Jean-Claude Kalache and editor Stephen Schaffer (as well as a score by Thomas Newman that pushes the emotional buttons hard), and fine voice work overall, Sohn’s film emerges as a gorgeous but rather heavy-handed allegory of an opposites-attract romance, given some genuine heft only in its undercurrents about anti-immigrant attitudes.            

“Elemental” is certainly superior to “Strange World,” the last Disney animated feature released to theatres, and also one more notable for its visuals than its narrative.  But especially for kids, it’s inferior to some that went straight to streaming, like “Luca,” which was both far more fun and more touching.  And adults will probably look back to “Inside Out” and “Soul” as Pixar offerings that took on serious subjects to greater effect.

They all are likely to agree, though, that “Up” was one of Pixar’s best, and its main character reappears with Ed Asner’s voice in the short “Carl’s Date,” which is being released as a kind of overture to “Elemental.”  Unfortunately, it fails to recapture the spirit of the 2009 classic—it’s okay but frankly negligible.