Trainwreck

Comedian Amy Schumer makes her feature film writing début with Trainwreck, a raunchy comedy centering on a thirtysomething magazine writer named Amy (Schumer) who shuns traditional attitudes about sex and relationships and dedicates herself to having a good time all the time. Amy’s uninhibited lifestyle gets upended when she starts to fall for the subject of her latest article, a charming and sincere sports doctor to the stars named Aaron (Bill Hader). Amy’s struggles around her long-held fears of commitment and monogamy are heightened when she and her straight-laced sister (Brie Larson) have to move their father (Colin Quinn) into assisted living, as his multiple sclerosis advances.

Schumer the writer fashions a screenplay ideally suited for the talents of Schumer the actor.  Director/Producer Judd Apatow—for better or worse the comedy Godfather of an entire generation—brings all his strengths and weaknesses to the proceedings. Though Apatow has worked closely with many writer/actors (from Ben Stiller in the ‘90s to Lena Dunham in the ‘10s), this is the first feature he’s directed that he did not script himself.  The powerhouse producer encouraged Schumer to write this semi-autobiographical story on the strength of her stand-up and the way she deftly uses her distinctive comic voice to challenge contemporary views of sexuality and gender roles. Though Trainwreck follows the standard Apatow arc of an unambitious adult who must give up their extended adolescence once they discover the deeper joys and challenges of true love and responsibility, Schumer brings a fresh female perspective to the formula.

She has essentially written a Seth Rogen role for herself, but since Amy is a woman and her primary relationship is with her male love interest rather than a female friend, Trainwreck works as a legit romantic comedy. This dynamic sets it apart from most Apatow films, which are essentially buddy movies that devolve into rom-coms without devoting enough screentime to their secondary love stories to earn the sentimentality they shamelessly traffic in.

Trainwreck is afflicted by two major problems that plague most of Apatow’s work. First and foremost is the length. At 2 hours and 4 minutes, the film is one of the director’s shorter pictures, but it’s still far too shaggy and self-indulgent. Apatow seems incapable of making a tight 90 to 110 minute comedy that we might want to watch over and over. His comedies all run over 2 hours (one clocks in at an interminable 146 minutes) and feature repetitive gags and protracted sequences that strain a viewer’s tolerance.

The worst example of this inability to see past individual laughs for the greater good of the overall picture occurs near the end of Trainwreck. It’s a gag scene that belongs in neither a straight rom-com nor a satirical send-up. It’s basically a standalone sketch that not only doesn’t advance the story or its themes, it stops the movie dead in its tracks right at the point when it should be building up steam. This intrusion wouldn’t be so terrible if the sketch was laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s just a one-note joke repeated several times. In fact, like so much of the sketch comedy found on the Internet (including many of Schumer’s most well-known viral videos), the humor and relevance all comes from the premise and the fact that it features celebrities playing themselves. As a piece of writing, however, it’s flat and uninspired, and should have been relegated to the deleted scenes collection on the DVD.

The other major Apatow problem, the director’s tonal inconsistency, also rears its frustrating head in Trainwreck. The movie tries to be a satirical critique of rom-coms while still functioning as one. It constantly shifts between sarcastic detachment from anything even remotely schmaltzy to asking the audience to suddenly care about Amy’s emotional state when she starts pulling at our heartstrings. Schumer and Apatow clearly hope to convey the unconscious ways their protagonist uses cynicism, ironic humor, and other distancing behaviors out of a genuine fear of intimacy. But getting viewers to fully invest in a character like this one requires more subtlety and craftsmanship than this writer and director can muster up. Rather than explore their themes beyond a surface level, they’re content to hurl as many jokes and sight gags at us as possible, while constantly making their characters verbally explain the overt subtext to us.

Fortunately, a lot of the humor lands. Schumer is a gifted comedian both physically and verbally. And, while she’s both pretty and sexy, she looks like a real person rather than the impossibly beautiful movie stars who normally populate romantic comedies.  Similarly, Hader is not exactly leading-man handsome, but his understated turn as Aaron helps ground the story despite the exaggerated world in which it takes place. Hader, a brilliant comic performer and SNL alum, has recently demonstrated a flair for nuanced acting in films like The Skeleton Twins and even the animated Inside Out. He seems perfectly at home playing the straight man to Schumer’s wild and crazy gal, never trying to finagle equal time or upstage the picture’s true star. 

In one of the more amusing spins on the rom-com, Aaron’s best friend and confidant is Lebron James (played by the basketball star himself). To put it in Nora Ephron terms, LeBron is Bill Hader’s Bruno Kirby (or more accurately his Rosie O’Donnell). In addition to being arguably the greatest athlete of all time, James turns out to possess a winning screen presence, and he finds a whimsical dynamic with Hader in their early exchanges. Unfortunately LeBron’s character doesn’t serve any substantial narrative function other than to overtly state the themes of the movie again and again. The scenes between James and Hader just replay the same three jokes to an ever-diminishing comic effect. Like so much in Trainwreck, a great idea has not been properly woven into the screenplay nor sufficiently pared down in the editing process. Therefore it actually becomes tiresome rather than increasingly funny.

The all-star supporting cast is an eclectic mix of comedians (Quinn, Mike Birbiglia, Vanessa Bayer, Dave Attell); celebrity athletes (James, Amar'e Stoudemire, and a memorable John Cena); and brilliant film actors (Larson, Ezra Miller, Norman Lloyd, and the peerless Tilda Swinton). As great as these diverse talents are in their individual scenes, they don’t always coalesce well into the whole.

Quinn is note-perfect as Amy’s father in the flashback scene that starts the picture and establishes Amy’s relationship issues, but he isn’t really up to the task of convincingly portraying the aging father required for the more serious side of the movie, when Amy and her sister place their pop in an assisted living facility. His scenes with the veteran character actor Norman Lloyd, playing his randy nursing home buddy, are woefully off. Quinn’s supposedly elderly dad looks about 45 next to the 100-year-old Noland, and there’s no chemistry between them. For someone familiar with Noland’s storied career (which dates back to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock’s early American films) it also injects a rather tragic note into the proceedings to think that this embarrassing and disposable role might be the final screen appearance for an actor whose career nearly spans the entire history of sound cinema.

Cinephiles may get a similarly queasy feeling watching the workplace scenes featuring Tilda Swinton as Amy’s boss, and Ezra Miller as the office intern. Swinton can do no wrong and she’s extremely funny as the eccentric, blunt, cynical magazine editor. But seeing her play broad two-dimensional scenes with the talented Miller, who played her sociopath son in Lynne Ramsay’s masterful We Need To Talk About Kevin just four years prior, distracts from the humor and injects sour notes into the sequences. Granted, there are probably few people in Trainwreck’s target audience who saw We Need To Talk About Kevin and even fewer who will remember that Miller played the title role in that tremendous and disturbing picture, but for those of us that do, it’s difficult to reconcile both coexisting. 

I doubt Swinton or Miller feel that appearing together in Trainwreck cheapens their work in Kevin, as it undoubtedly showcases their tremendous range in playing ultra serious drama and over-the-top screwball comedy. But this hyperawareness of an actor’s craft and talent exemplifies what often prevents me from fully enjoying contemporary comedies. The primary focus in the milieu Apatow and his collaborators and imitators have created encourages viewers to focus on individual actors (or celebrities) rather than to lose themselves in a story. Nearly every other scene in Trainwreck gleefully sidesteps the narrative to showcase a performer, an idea, or an elaborately constructed set piece. Then copious amounts of unfunny, self-aware dialogue are piled on to get the plot back on track. 

The Apatow school of filmmaking emphasizes numerous takes where actors improvise around the scripted material, with the director often throwing out alternative lines while the cameras role. This method is ostensibly used to capture something fresh, organic, and spontaneous, but more often than not it ends up feeling contrived. There are many factors that contribute to the weakened state of contemporary American feature film comedies, but this lack of faith in the written word seems preeminent. In the days of celluloid, writer/directors needed to craft brilliant, efficient dialogue that would simultaneously get laughs, drive the plot forward, and convey the subtext. In the digital age, filmmakers can shoot countless approaches to a scene and do take after take of alternate jokes and improvised lines, figuring out what works best later on in the editing room. While this approach certainly can result in more laughs per minute of film, the overall picture almost always suffers. 

As much fault as I found in Trainwreck, I still recommend it because Schumer is an exciting comedic force and this fictionalized version of herself is even more entertaining than her stand-up and sketch personas on her TV show Inside Amy Schumer. While Trainwreck does not fill me with confidence that Apatow will someday create a great film, it does make me eager to see what Schumer does next.