Trainwreck is a
sweet and salty romantic comedy loaded down with endless digressions, smirking
vulgarity, stand-up dressed up as dialogue, and sudden dips into sentimental
drama. If you think that sounds like a Judd Apatow picture, you’re exactly
right, all the way down to the over-two-hours runtime. But here he’s working
from a screenplay by Amy Schumer, who also stars. She brings her sense of tart
gender politics and sly observational ear, as showcased in her hit-and-miss sketch
show on Comedy Central, folding them into a movie that’s both unmistakable from
her voice, and undeniably part of the Apatow approach. It starts with liberal
raunch, and ends with conservative coupling, locates what it judges immaturity
in its main character and finds reason to induce what it thinks is emotional
growth. But at least the movie, which could easily fit into his man-child
comedies’ tropes, follows a woman, and commits to telling a story from her
perspective.
Schumer stars as a reporter for a magazine living a fun New
York City life with lots of alcohol, pot, and a revolving door of quick relationships
and one-night stands. Side-stepping the usual rom-com setup, she’s not exactly
looking to settle down. Her latest sort-of-boyfriend was a hulking muscle man
(John Cena) she never quite liked. So she’s as surprised as anyone else when
she might actually love a sports’ doctor (Bill Hader) her editor (Tilda
Swinton) has assigned her to interview. The following story finds Schumer and
Hader cautiously moving toward a relationship, having fun hanging out, and
eventually hitting every girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy beat you’d expect. But
the melding of Schumer and Apatow’s comedic sensibilities makes the resulting
film feel loose and shapeless, so that the big moments take a long time coming
and approach from different angles, moments somehow fresh despite so
retrospectively obvious.
Apatow has certainly never been a filmmaker who cuts out
lengthy riffs or dawdling detours. (When it works best, like in his Funny People, there’s a fine lived-in
quality.) And Schumer has never been a writer particular interested in holding
back frank talk. (Her best sketches have a precise ear for unspoken assumptions.)
Together, they find a nice groove, an appealingly shaggy amusement that’s always
going where you suspect it is, but unhurried about getting there. This
accommodates all sorts of digressions in a textured approach to what other
films would play for easy shock humor or manipulative sentiment (although
there’s that, too). Though Schumer and Hader have a warm, relaxed chemistry,
which sells their rom-com paces, the film’s length and pokiness allows for a
wider understanding of her character. We get just as much time with sneakily
moving, and frankly more interesting, prickly relationships with her sick
father (Colin Quinn) and married sister (Brie Larson).
Could every single scene be shorter, and cut more tightly?
Yes. But then the movie would lose some of the rambling quality that drifts it
away from formula and into its characters lives. Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes
(HBO’s Girls) finds casual beauty to
their New York existences, from spacious apartments to cramped subways, while
the movie meanders along, exploring a deep bench of side characters,
caricatures and cameos all. We meet a gaggle of magazine employees (Vanessa
Bayer, Randall Park, Jon Glaser, and Ezra Miller), a senile elderly man (Norman
Lloyd), a homeless guy (Dave Atell), suburbanites (including Mike Birbiglia,
Tim Meadows, and Nikki Glaser), and LeBron James (as himself). They’re all mostly
inessential to the overarching narrative (especially an even weirder batch of
celebrity appearances near the end), but irreplaceable for the windows into
Schumer and Hader’s lives outside the romantic comedy world in which they’re
living.
Because this is a more expansive ramble than most comedies
attempt, there’s small disappointment in finding it settle back into formulaic
moments. But how often do you get to see a rom-com these days, especially one so intent on fully fleshing in its
characters outside their interactions with each other? And rarer still are the movies told so persuasively from a woman’s
point of view, placing an obvious and welcome focus on her pleasure, her
opinions, and her complicated evolving decisions. (It also flips the usual romance
gender dynamics, making her the commitment-phobe, and he the one ready to
settle down.) There’s a sting of earnest truthfulness in Schumer’s framing of
familial and romantic relationships, tired wisdom where people grow together or
apart for understandable, relatable reasons instead of flailing sitcom
misunderstanding. Here’s a movie broad enough to support goofy sex scenes and big
silly behavior, while containing it within a believable emotional world. That
it’s uneven comes with the territory.
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