Review: Trainwreck

Amy Schumer plays Amy, which is rather helpful for a non-actor to remember the name of their character, I suppose. As a child, Amy’s womanising father (Colin Quinn) seems to have passed down some bad behaviours, as now 30ish Amy has a similarly non-monogamous outlook on relationships. Yes she’s in a relationship with a likeable (but possibly gay) meathead played by John Cena (!), but she finds random (and frequently alcohol-fuelled) hook-ups to be more workable for her. That might just change, however, when for her job at Snuff magazine (yep, Snuff) her demanding boss Tilda Swinton assigns her the task of interviewing sports doctor Bill Hader. Despite Amy’s desire to keep things casual and preferably one-night only, she finds herself beginning a relationship with the boring but nice doctor. Meanwhile, Amy also has to contend with her father’s increasing MS that results in having to be put into assisted living care. She also has a sister (Brie Larson), who is everything Amy is not: Monogamously married with kids, a realist, and stable. LeBron James plays himself as one of Hader’s clients, whilst Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, and Ezra Miller play her work colleagues.

 

I’m not an Amy Schumer fan, but don’t think for a second that I think she has no talent. I’ve laughed at a few moments of her TV show (she does a great bit on Latina women’s voices always sounding sexy, even when they’re tired and cranky), but my basic problem with her is that she’s one-dimensional. She’s all schtick, all of the time. She’s a snarky girl with a potty mouth and a face like a Cabbage Patch Kid doll. That’s not me being rude, it’s part of who Schumer is, just as Sarah Silverman is the girl with the chipmunk face and voice who is snarky and has a potty mouth. And believe me, I love snark and I love swearing. But with Schumer, that’s seemingly her 24/7. In interviews, she shows no signs of the person beneath the schtick, mainly because I suppose that’s what you want to see from her in interviews anyway. However, when you make it to the big screen and you start having to play characters, one-dimensional shtick just isn’t going to cut it. No, not even when you’ve written the screenplay yourself, and play a character named Amy who is probably very close to who you are. All you’re doing is stretching your shtick even thinner than on your 30 minute TV comedy show. At over 2 hours this big screen debut for Schumer directed by Judd Apatow (“The 40 Year Old Virgin”, “Funny People”) is asking for a helluva lot of tolerance for Amy from me. I’m afraid this one’s just not for me, folks, but it’s not a total lost cause, mainly because Schumer does have comedic talent. But my favourite moments in the film were the two or three (very) brief moments when she kinda sorta had to step out of ‘Amy Schtick’ and play real, genuine emotions beyond ‘sarcasm’ and ‘hangover after a previous night of questionable behaviour’. The rest…yeah, it’s an acquired taste, and occasionally quite boring. The whole casual dating thing isn’t something I really care about, and add drinking to get drunk on top of that, the subject matter just isn’t for me.

 

The film starts well with an hilarious speech by the usually unfunny Colin Quinn as Amy’s dad, explaining to a young Amy and her sister why he’s leaving their mother. Quinn is actually pretty terrific in the role, and believe me I don’t think he’s one of the better ‘Weekend Update’ anchors in “SNL” history (In fact, the only one I think was worse would be Seth Meyers, who always seemed to pause for applause for so long between jokes that it looked seriously desperate). Also, the terrible magazine Amy works at in the film is amusingly crude. I’m also completely in love with Brie Larson. Sorry, that just came out. She’s absolutely terrific and charismatic as Amy’s more grounded, sensible and married sister. They seem to have pretty good chemistry, too, which can’t be easy when one of the two seems to be a character playing a caricature of that character. I must admit, though, that at times it looked like Larson was stifling a case of the giggles opposite Schumer. Charismatic and a great actress, she steals her every scene effortlessly, mostly by playing someone who resembles a legitimate human being. I wanted to see a movie about her instead, damn it. Meanwhile, I’ve only found Bill Hader sporadically funny on “SNL” (His truly bizarre Stefon character is riotously funny, usually because Hader could never stop corpsing on most occasions) but he makes for a fine straight man here, and is quite believable as a doctor. He’s got that same dry quality that served Dan Aykroyd well for many years playing similarly intelligent characters. He’s also quite likeable, which helps makes this whole thing more bearable. There’s a funny scene where an all-night argument with Schumer affects his ability to perform surgery the next morning.

 

I’ve never understood the whole casual dating thing, even on “Seinfeld” (which I love), but at least this film isn’t trying to be a romcom. It’s a comedy that just happens to deal with relationships. But look, I just can’t truly get invested in this story when there is kind of a black hole at its centre. All snark all the time just isn’t enough to get me invested in this character and her adventures. Sure, Chevy Chase got away with it in the “Fletch” movies, but those films were spectacularly silly, this is a film trying to ground itself more in reality, and that’s hard to accept when the lead ‘actress’ appears to be putting up a front or acting too cool for the room. There’s appeal in that for me, but limited appeal. If this isn’t just schtick but who Schumer truly is 24/7, then all I can say is that a little of her goes not all that far. She’s got something, but it’s not variety and she’s a lot more effective on stage at a club or in sketch comedy. Others may disagree, totally identify with what her ‘character’ says and does here, and excuse the fact that 99.99% of the time, Schumer isn’t really acting. But as I said at the outset, the only times in this film that I sensed an actual person in the film were the fleeting moments of snark-free emotion. A scene where she gets an unfortunate phone call provide two seconds where Schumer shows she can do more than just play the Amy Schumer snarky potty mouth character. The subsequent scene also offers more genuine ‘acting’ from Schumer, albeit interspersed with some typical Amy gags, as she delivers a monologue at a sombre event. Still, they were for me the two best moments in the entire film featuring Schumer. They were the only moments in which she approached something remotely likeable. Her usual persona, whatever you might think of it, ‘likeable’ it most certainly is not. That works in other mediums, but not when you’re the main character of a relationship movie I’m afraid. Likeability to at least identification are crucial. Cast the very dry and sarcastic, but still likeable and talented Aubrey Plaza in the lead and I’d have much less of a problem with the film.

 

Schumer’s not the only uneven talent on display here, as recurring appearances by basketball star LeBron James and WWE ‘Superstar’ John Cena have their ups and downs. LeBron’s first appearance in the film was no doubt meant to be funny, however I didn’t realise it was LeBron until Bill Hader’s character mentioned him by name, so the joke fell flat with me. I recognised him as a basketballer, sure, but hell if I could tell you what LeBron James looked like before this film. His second appearance in the film, however, is genuinely funny in a ‘Mike Tyson behaving uncharacteristically’ kinda way. He might just be one of the better athletes-taking-to-comedy, at least on scant evidence here. There’s an hilarious scene where he and Hader play basketball, or more to the point, LeBron plays basketball around Hader, who is completely ineffectual. As for The Inflatable Hulk, Mr. Cena is a whole lotta awkward in this film. As a wrestling fan on and off since I was 6, I gotta tell you there were sights here that I did not want to see and will never unsee. A fully naked Cena having sex with (a clearly clothed) Schumer is embarrassingly awkward and unfunny. Part of this is because seeing Cena almost entirely naked (no genitals are shown, obviously) is going to haunt me forever. I’m sorry, but his body is truly, truly suspicious. Part of it is because I’m fully aware that Schumer used to date WWE’s Dolph Ziggler back in the day, and has previously talked about what their sex was like. Seeing her having sex with Cena here makes it almost impossible not to assume Cena is playing Ziggler. All of his sports/gym cliché sex talk comes across as very, very (awkwardly) familiar to anyone who has heard Schumer discuss her sex life with Ziggler as ‘too athletic’. It might play as funny to some, but although Cena’s actually pretty good in the role, I kept wanting to cover my eyes and ears. It wasn’t funny to me at all. I did, however, like the in-joke with Cena being called ‘Mark Wahlberg’ at one point, as Cena has often been compared to ‘ol Marky Mark, sans Funky Bunch. As a wrestling fan, the Koko B. Ware name drop got a big laugh out of me, too. His character wanting to get married and have kids, by the way, was hilarious for unintentional reasons. Yeah, I’ve watched “Total Divas”. Fuck you, you’ve watched it, too. But those are fleeting moments, the rest of his scenes were awkward. By the way, I mentioned earlier that Schumer was clothed during her wild sex scene with the very naked Mr. Cena. Yeah, I’m going there again. I’m sorry to keep harping on it in seemingly every review, but it pisses me off to once again find an actress willing to talk about all kinds of dirty stuff, but when it comes time to simulate the art of lovemaking on screen…she’s wearing clothing. Y’know, like how you’re great grandparents used to do it. Amy Schumer the person in real life may have sex fully clothed or in her underwear, but I don’t believe it, and I certainly didn’t believe it here. Her behaviour otherwise seems to contradict such a thing, and don’t even think about hitting me with ‘female gaze’ bullshit. I know all about the history of the ‘male gaze’, this has nothing to do with giving balance. It’s about an actress unwilling to be entirely honest with the requirements of her subject matter.

 

Hader seems to have brought in a lot of his “SNL” buddies to assist Schumer here, but aside from Quinn and Hader, none of them are really around long enough to do anything substantial, unless Vanessa Bayer annoying the fuck out of me by playing the same gummy smiley shy girl she plays in every sketch on “SNL” counts as doing something substantial. Seriously, her entire comedy act appears to be smiling nervously and showing her gums, and that is literally her role in this film. Why couldn’t they get the wonderful Cecily Strong in here somewhere? Ten times the talent of Bayer if you ask me. Pete Davidson is around long enough for me to remark ‘Hey, it’s the guy who plays the guy everyone thinks is the work experience kid on “SNL” and that’s totally all he’s good for’. Tim Meadows turns up to remind everyone that his Ladies Man character is the only time he has ever been funny in or out of “SNL”. Hell, I even laughed quite a bit at the “Ladies Man” movie. Leslie Jones, like Schumer is a one-note performer (her schtick is somewhere in between Sam Kinison and Tracy Morgan), but unlike Schumer, her schtick (mostly comedic shouting) actually makes me laugh, albeit not so much here. There’s a cute movie-within-the-movie cameo appearance by Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei as characters in a seriously pretentious arthouse film. Tomei is pretty much everything Schumer isn’t; A talented actress, absolutely charismatic, and immensely, inherently likeable. Much less enjoyable are the inexplicable cameos by Matthew Broderick, Chris Evert, and American sports announcer Marv Albert. I really didn’t need to hear Evert say ‘cock block’ as though it were inherently funny coming from her. Why Americans continue to assume that non-Americans will know all of their media personalities and sports stars is beyond me, but at least I had heard of Albert, so I’ll let that one slide. He isn’t funny, though, so that I can’t ignore.

 

Look out for 100+ year old film veteran Norman Lloyd (who, if you love your movies, you may remember from a scene-stealing turn in Hitchcock’s “Saboteur”) as Quinn’s fellow assisted living resident. He doesn’t look a day over 75, if you ask me, and yes there’s a big difference. Incredibly durable. Less enjoyable to see was an unrecognisable, blonde Tilda Swinton seemingly aping Sally Hawkins’ accent in a totally unfunny, completely unconvincing caricature masquerading as a performance. What on Earth was Tilda thinking? Whatever she thought she was doing, she was doing it wrong. Mind you, if she’s a poor imitator, that probably makes her more bearable than the real thing when you think about it. Hawkins makes my ears bleed.

 

Overlength aside, this isn’t really a Judd Apatow film, it’s an Amy Schumer film. If you’re a fan, you’ll love it. I don’t think it’s terrible, I just think a lot of it is one-note, as is the film’s star. I enjoyed some of this, was bored by quite a bit of it, and it’s just not for me. Hell, it only gets its soft C+ rating due to Amy doing a cheerleading routine in the climax to Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”. That was funny stuff, the rest is all over the shop.

 

Rating: C+