(Credit: A24)

Writer and director Nicole Holofcener is known and admired for her skill at exploring strange or funny aspects of human relations in her earlier films like Enough Said and The Last Duel and her television work. Her latest feature reaches a new level by finding comedy, both light and dark, in the concept of honesty, dealing with the polite lies, evasions, and charitable deceptions involved in managing a relationship.

Centred on two married couples and their various friends, relatives, and business contacts, the film follows its characters through a series of personal conflicts and minor crises, taking scathing but hilarious note of the difficulty and danger of being entirely honest with loved ones, and the many ways couples and family members use benign deceit. The result is as touching and as relatable as it is funny.

The highlight of the film is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, of Veep and Seinfeld fame, as the lead character Beth, a successful writer with a new novel about to be published. Director Nolofcener worked with Louis-Dreyfus on a previous film, Enough Said, and elicits an even more effective comedic performance here. Beth is married to Don (played charmingly and with low-key hilarity by Tobias Menzies), a family therapist whose clinical discussions with his absurdly dysfunctional clients act as counterpoint and commentary on the main characters’ troubles.

The film opens on the first of a series of darkly comical sessions in which Don counsels a madly hostile married couple (interestingly, played by real-life married couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn), his professional calm outmatched by the nonstop, petty sniping and the couple’s resistance to change. None of the film’s main characters has as problematic a relationship as Don’s clients, but it emerges that they may share key problems.

The cast of characters are introduced as nice, intelligent people, openly affectionate with one another, although the theme of the slipperiness of honesty emerges early on – when Beth and her sister deal with rude, irritating people at their weekly charity work, assure each other, with false cheer, that helping the poor is “so rewarding”. This leads to the story’s central conflict: Beth overhears Don saying that he doesn’t really care for his wife’s new book, which she finds devastating. Her reaction to this revelation serves as a catalyst that makes first Beth, then Don, and then those close to them increasingly and disconcertingly aware of how often the truth is altered or hidden, even between the closest of couples or friends.

Once that Pandora’s box has been opened, the characters and the audience, along with them, become uncomfortably aware of how often they all sidestep the truth – out of kindness, in order to be supportive, or just to avoid conflict. Suddenly, the air is fairly buzzing with every form of white lie and evasion possible. The viewer can’t help but notice that Beth’s sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) keeps diplomatically falling back on calling everything “cute” to avoid criticising or that Beth and Don still burden their adult son with unearned praise, meant to “encourage” him, as they did when he was a small child. Even polite greetings and unthinking replies given to tradesmen are suddenly laden with significance. The tightly written script allows an increasing amount of the dialogue to contain prevarications, which become more entertaining as the characters become more self-consciously aware of them. 

By way of a warning against too much honesty, we meet Beth and Sarah’s elderly mother, played to hilarious perfection by Jeannie Berlin, whose relentless bluntness is funny but painfully unhelpful – much like that of Don’s hopeless clients, who make regular appearances. Placing most of the central characters in creative fields provides a lot of opportunities for the cast to deal with the challenges of offering support without openly lying and of offering constructive criticism to chronically insecure artsy types without injuring their fragile self-esteem.

The characters’ obstacle course through the difficult work of being both honest and supportive is represented by not only Beth and Don’s dispute but their son’s recent breakup, several deeply uncomfortable public quarrels, and Sarah’s conviction that insincerely praising the work of her self-doubting actor husband (Arian Moayed) is indispensable to a successful marriage. 

The talent and group chemistry of the well-chosen ensemble cast boost the comedy of the script in spite of its singular theme. They also do well at expressing positivity in the upbeat final act, in which the characters make peace with their level of honesty, allow for the weirdness of human interactions, and learn how to use the truth effectively, whether in the counselling sessions which Don readjusts with amusingly mixed results or in personal relationships. Some work past their aversion to real honesty – including Beth and her son, who overcome their differences with the help of a wild slapstick robbery scene. Some even find a way to acknowledge the need for friendly deception and turn it into a private joke. It is a perfect, provisionally happy ending to a funny, insightful take on the complex subject of truth.