Trainwreck
Director: Judd Apatow
(In theaters)
B+
When Amy Schumer walks in Trainwreck, her ponytail draws the eye as it swings back and forth with the impressive reach and precision of a metronome. Turns out, that look stands as a symbol for the film itself: cute on the surface, deeper underneath.
Graduating from comedian to movie star in one fell swoop — thanks in large part to a smart and deeply personal script of her own doing — Schumer plays a young New Yorker named Amy, which is to say a near-Xerox version of the drunken slut she inhabits in her acidic — and wildly funny (and funnier) — stand-up act. Instead of telling jokes, this fictional Amy tells stories, as a writer for a too-hip city magazine run by a crazy woman (Snowpiercer’s Tilda Swinton, glammed up to a point of nonrecognition). Whereas her fellow staffers work on pieces like a guide to workplace masturbation, Amy is assigned to profile Aaron (Saturday Night Live vet Bill Hader), a sports-medicine physician. Among his roster of superstar patients is basketball’s LeBron James, who is better than expected in a supporting role as himself, but one-upped in the department of scene-stealing by WWE champ John Cena (The Marine), playing not himself, but Amy’s steroidal, sexually confused suitor.
Aaron is as buttoned-up as Amy is fucked-up, so, as romantic comedies demand, these opposites must attract. But Trainwreck is not your average rom-com, as anyone familiar with Schumer’s 50 shades of blue humor (so blue, it’s the warmest color) knows before frame one. Given that and a ratio more “com” than “rom,” the material is a natural for Judd Apatow. Although this marks the first movie he’s directed that he didn’t also write, Trainwreck works as a gender-flipped and experience-flipped variant of his 40-Year-Old Virgin. Schumer’s work bears those Apatow touchstones — awkward sex, pot smoking, riff-o-matic exchanges that wear out their welcome — yet the collaborators still manage to exploit the old Hollywood template (musical number included!) as they imbue it with pain and a vulnerability most leading ladies are not allowed to exhibit, much less possess.
More goes on in Trainwreck than meets the eye — not a ton, but enough to notice a difference; you’ll feel it first in your funny bone, then your heart. You’ll also feel it in your butt, because Apatow needlessly takes his movies to the two-hour mark and blows past it. Unlike 2012’s This Is 40 — and thank God for that! — at least this time he’s spared us from casting his two daughters. This one is Schumer’s turn in the spotlight, and she takes it and she makes it. Whether she can do it again …
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This random movie review escaped from the archives of Flick Attack.
