Comedian Amy Schumer gets her chance to shine on the big screen with
Trainwreck, playing, appropriately, Amy, working by day as a
journalist at a men's lifestyle and celebrity gossip publication, but
who drinks hard, gets high, and carouses with the opposite sex even
harder when not on the clock. Life's in a predictable pattern of not
getting too committed to things until she is assigned a piece on a
famous sports doctor named Aaron (Hader,
Inside Out), with whom she begins to see, and more than once. Meanwhile, Amy has even more
on her plate when her philandering, hard-drinking father, Gordon
(Quinn, A Night at the Roxbury), is
hospitalized and put into assisted living, while Kim (Larson,
The Gambler), Amy's pragmatic married
sister, is constantly trying to get her to give up her hedonistic ways.
It culminates in Amy coming to rely on the rock-solid support of
Aaron, while all the while fighting off getting in too deep due to her
own feelings on the kind of life that she should be leading.
If you know Schumer's style of off-color comedy, you'll know that a
lot of Trainwreck deals with candid dating observations and
sometimes-explicit sexual exploits, filtered into the form of a
semi-autobiographical narrative script that she penned herself.
It manages to be a cut above a typical sex comedy due to it being more
about just sex and relationships, as the film also encroaches into how
one's upbringing can affect one's attitudes toward these things later
in life, and how major life changes such as illness and death can also
cause major shifts in one's entrenched outlook on what to do with the
rest of one's life. It also deals with how some people live in
order to achieve what they feel will make them happy, while others
live in order to avoid those things that cause unease, uncertainty,
and pain. Amy is firmly in the latter camp, as risking nothing
emotionally then drowning out guilt with alcohol keeps her from losing
anything she might hold dear.
Schumer makes a concerted effort to reverse the gender roles typical
of these kinds of rom-coms by making the woman the one who needs to
mature and the man the one to make her
want to live a life better than she has been. However, it's one of
those satires on rom-com conventions that also embraces them as well, enjoying
tinkering with the formula just enough to distance itself, but also
suggesting that there's some merit in the traditional outcome. Schumer shows that, along with her Comedy Central show,
"Inside Amy Schumer", that she will likely have legs in the
entertainment business. She even nails a moving funeral speech
in the film with feelings of emotion that feel absolutely genuine,
making her a pretty good actress as well.
Trainwreck is directed by Judd Apatow (This
is 40, Knocked Up), which carries with it
everything you'd expect, both good and bad, in his first effort
directing a script he didn't at least partially write (though that may
be a moot point since his movies are often ad-libbed regardless).
The 'good' is that Apatow is a seasoned veteran at ribald sex comedies
that deal with maturing, and has a good ear for what's funny more
often than not. The 'bad' is that he still can't seem to winnow
down his movies to 100 minutes, often leaving in entire scenes in the
movie that not only aren't funny (a minutes-long scene involving an
intervention with celebrities is painfully unfunny, as is a film
parody called "The Dog Walker" featuring Daniel Radcliffe (What
If) and Marisa Tomei (Spare
Parts), but they make the storyline itself
feel like an afterthought after a cavalcade of celebrity cameos and to
squeeze in his cronies in the stand-up comedy business.
It's overly lengthy and often uneven, but Schumer's characterizations,
as well as quality work by an impressive supporting cast that gets
funny performances from John Cena (The Marine) and LeBron James
("The LeBrons"), and a nearly
unrecognizable turn from a woman who has been making a second career
on doing just that, Tilda Swinton (The
Grand Budapest Hotel), as Dianna, the unscrupulous
magazine editor looking to push things to the limit for their readers.
Hader is the straight man in this movie, the nice guy who isn't like
the others, which means he's not given many funny things to do other
than to react to the kooky characters around him, perhaps another
cutting commentary on how women are often underutilized when they are
used in these sorts of roles.
Despite the high overhead of Apatow's inability to curb his
indulgences, there are enough good belly laughs to be had in some very
funny moments, especially as Schumer explores the modern dating scene.
The movie doesn't live up to its name, as it stalls occasionally, but
never derails. Though there are many stops
along the way, Schumer's screenplay keeps Trainwreck on track
to its ultimate destination of insightful and very funny
entertainment
Qwipster's rating
