Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Amy Schumer
Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Brie Larson, Vanessa Bayer, Tilda Swinton, Mike Birbiglia, John Cena, LeBron James
Runtime: 125 mins.
2015
Lord knows a female-led, female-written comedy that involves a heaping helping of sex positivity is de facto refreshing. Let's keep that in mind moving forward.
The opening scene of Trainwreck is a sepia-tinted portrayal of a father informing his two daughters that he and their mother will be getting a divorce. The joke is that he tries to explain to the children that he got caught sleeping around both in a language they can understand, and in a way that makes them sympathetic to him. The staging of the scene--the driveway in front of the house, dusk, what looks like heat lightning in the distance--deepens the humor with a sense of melancholy. The scene is funny, weighty, and a perfect prologue to the boozy devil-may-care attitude of our main character, Amy (Amy Schumer), while also providing context for the more conservative settled-down behavior of her sister Kim (Brie Larson).
The rest of the film never matches the jokey melancholy of that first scene.
I'm having trouble structuring this review, maybe in part because Trainwreck's structure is so slapdash that it's hard for me to maintain any sort of mental picture of the film. The movie's only unifying factor is "the sexual exploits of Amy," which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. I would love to see a more avant garde sort of romantic comedy that commits to a fractured and dissipated structure; one of the best movies I've ever seen is called Happy-Go-Lucky, a movie that follows a British woman through her day-to-day life parsing out minor insights into her character but offering very little in terms of overarching plot structure. Unfortunately, Trainwreck commits to no such thing, keeping one foot in the laissez-faire portrait-painting world of Amy's sex life, and one foot in the hyper-structured world of formulaic romantic comedies. The result is a muddled film that feels unfocused, overlong, and a bit schizophrenic. I can't help but wonder how much of that is a conflict between the vision of writer-performer Schumer and the vision of director and uncredited script-polisher Judd Apatow.
So much of the film feels like set-ups that are only obliquely paid off, or pay-offs that haven't properly been set up. [Spoilers until after the italics a few paragraphs below, although it's hard to care as much about spoilers in a movie like this.] The father's death and subsequent funeral crops up at about the three-quarters mark, complete with Amy's tear-jerking eulogy. But we hadn't spent enough time with the man to care a lick about his death, and the time that was spent didn't hit the themes of legacy as hard as it needed to. There's a whole subplot about Kim wanting to move the father to a cheaper nursing home that, thanks to this death, never pays off in the slightest. Amy is commissioned to write an article about this guy Aaron (Bill Hader) who later becomes her love interest, but the article, which apparently takes weeks upon weeks upon weeks to write, has only a minor effect on the proceedings. The fact that Amy is unethically dating the subject of her article should have become clear to her boss (Tilda Swinton) at the funeral, as all three of them were there, but in the very next scene the boss appears to know nothing about the relationship. Speaking of Swinton, the movies wastes a whole litany of side characters with great potential. How can you use Swinton so sparingly, and in such a boilerplate role? Why is Amy's friend at the office Nikki (Vanessa Bayer) even in the movie beyond giving Amy a person to talk to about vagina things? It's cool that Amy has a relationship with the homeless dude outside her house (Dave Attell), but it ends up being utterly inconsequential. LeBron James keeps popping up for schticky bits that can be summed up as, "it's funny to see LeBron acting like a normal person who has friends and talks about feelings and stuff." Maybe the only side characters who I really appreciated were Mike Birbiglia's doofy Tom (the world needs more Birbiglia) and John Cena's musclehead boyfriend Steven, whose character inexplicably disappears from the movie without fallout or consequence about halfway through.
It's a damned good thing this movie has Amy Schumer, who plays the hell out of one of the only characters to get any meat in this script. It's a damned bad thing that even Amy's central arc is stunted and confused. As I understand it, Schumer's comedy persona has to do with blunt honesty and openness about sex and relationships, which is exemplified by a few scenes of crushingly honest sexuality early in the film. People get angry with her sometimes, but she doesn't change, because it's clear she doesn't want to. But then it gets weird. Apparently her arc consists of shaping up for her new boyfriend Aaron. Even though he tells her the drinking and drugs and (former) sleeping around don't bother him (although he kind of goes back on this later?), she decides she needs to fix herself for him so that he won't be distracted at work; she tosses all her booze and weed, and she sets in motion a plan to win back his heart.
First weird thing: the reason she lost his heart in the first place is she needed to take a work phone call during a speech he was making, and then they had a perfectly healthy couple argument about it.
Second weird thing: if this movie was about sex positivity and normalizing certain forms of polyamory, why does Schumer's arc take her all the way away from that into traditional conservative romcom territory?
Third weird thing: her plan to win back Aaron's heart is to do a sexualized dance number with the squad of professional cheerleaders that she maligned earlier in the movie.
How does getting a squad of cheerleaders to help you do a sexy dance for your boyfriend indicate responsibility and character growth???
By this point in the film I had long stopped laughing at the jokes, even as everyone around me continued. I was bored, first of all, because most of the scenes start to feel like improv that lasts two beats too long (exemplified by a several part squabble in a movie theater), and because the movie could have shaved off a good 30-40 minutes and improved a great deal. But my laughter also tapered off because I started to sense the scattered weirdness of the progression of the film, and by the time the dance number played out I was more or less dumbfounded.
Visually, the movie is disappointingly straightforward. I call it disappointing because I was captivated by the framing of the first scene, especially as comedies are in general known for their workmanlike staging. Person A stands and delivers joke to person B, B stands and delivers joke to A, repeat. Trainwreck falls into that category, which is particularly frustrating after seeing the delightful visual and physical comedy showcased in Ant-Man on the very same weekend.
I have to admit that romantic comedies are not my genre of choice, and I haven't seen very many of them, so perhaps Trainwreck is head and shoulders above the typical fare. There are absolutely flashes of brilliance in the film; any given moment is engaging taken by itself, thanks to Schumer's superstar energy. It's really too bad the film quickly loses its way and slowly deflates as the interminable runtime plays out. Maybe I am a harsh judge of romcoms, but I believe Trainwreck doesn't do anything that Obvious Child didn't do far better last year. I hope Schumer goes on to refine her writing, or perhaps partner up with someone who won't saddle her talent with formulaic compromise. She should definitely make a movie with Jenny Slate.
1.5 / 5 BLOBS
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