Amy Schumer has already given us two of the year’s best pieces of standalone comedy: her amazing 12 Angry Men remake, where a jury of prestige-picture actors is convened to judge whether Schumer is hot enough to appear on television; and Last Fuckable Day, in which Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette get together to celebrate Julia Louis Dreyfus’s expiration from the ranks of entertainment-industry sexualisation. Each is an incisive piece of pop-cultural satire blithely taking down long-established stereotypes and their attendant glass ceilings; working as both funny jokes and pieces of essential activism.
With Schumer’s star in upwardly-mobile ascendance — her work hosting the MTV Movie Awards furthered her coming-out party — it was expected that Trainwreck, her debut film, would be her breakout’s culmination; 2015 in comedy officially consecrated as the Year Of Schumer. That narrative is so feted that it feels like critical rebellion to type, simply, that Trainwreck doesn’t quite work; and that, at worst, its choices and morals seem contrary to the spirit and politics of Schumer’s own comic work.
"Apatow’s fondness for conventions both rom-com and social seemed at odds with the aesthetic, morals, and comic energy of his collaborator."
It starts out much as you’d expect: Schumer plays a 30-something writer whose life is a constant stream of sarcastic magazine pieces, drunken one-night stands; her formative childhood memory one in which her father (Colin Quinn) announces her parents’ divorce with an impromptu, inappropriate lecture on the perils and limits of monogamy. Yet, this being a rom-com, such behaviour can only last ’til the second act. When she’s assigned to type an article about a sports doctor (Bill Hader), a disastrous first meeting soon turns budding romance, and this brings up her baggage: her love of stoned shenanigans, a tendency towards poor choices, a fear of commitment. She acts like a dick, there’s the sad-montage near the end, and, finally, she makes a big public display of love to win back Hader’s heart.
What she grapples with, and her character’s arc, are things usually assigned to the male rom-com lead; infinite iterations of this deathless genre giving us the dude who has to realise its time to stop sowing wild oats and settle down. Were you to give this film a sympathetic, quasi-feminist reading, you’d point to its inversion of the genre’s gender clichés; note that Hader is the sensitive, supportive half of the union, Schumer the balls-out, ridiculous womanchild.
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There’s something in this idea, given Trainwreck is directed by Judd Apatow, the one-time hero of cancelled-cult-TV-series mythos turned Hollywood powerbroker. His five directorial features — and countless others he’s written or produced — have created an Apatovian cinematic realm of males in various states of arrested-development, being nudged towards the conventionality of monogamy, kids, grown-up-ness.
Apatow has also leant, time-and-again, on the celebrity cameo for laughs. In 2009’s wildly-uneven Funny People, the endless ranks of famous humans often seemed a substitute for real comic ideas; and a scene in Trainwreck that features Marv Albert offering running commentary on an intervention that includes Chris Evert and Matthew Broderick feels like a variety-show sketch dying before your eyes; its premise almost instantly, horrifyingly unfunny. That scene also features the film’s scene-stealer, LeBron James, who plays Hader’s wacky-black-best-friend as a form of self-parody; he a version of LeBron that’s insecure, petty, and cheap.
It’s the most memorable turn in a oft-funny film in which Tilda Swinton and Mike Birbiglia both add contrary comic tones, Brie Larson adds dramatic depth to a wet-blanket-sister role, and wrestler John Cena takes to Apatow’s fondness for comic improv. Many of the scenes have that feeling of being stitched together from riffed-on jokes; which means Trainwreck lacks the screenwritten elegance of the rom-com genre at its most humming. At times, it feels as if Apatow and Schumer are less harmonious pairing, more opposing forces, competing for the soul of the film.
"It’s both unfunny and unromantic, but, beyond that, it also seems sad."
Which isn’t to say that their collaboration — he as director, she as writer/star — couldn’t have worked; or, even, doesn’t in parts. Apatow, after all, is no stranger to taking an oddball comic presence and presenting them with a starmaking rom-com vehicle: that’s what he did for Steve Carell with his first film (2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Seth Rogen with his second (2007’s Knocked Up); and, on the small-screen, with Lena Dunham on her TV series Girls.
Watching Trainwreck, I was reminded of Girls, and another instant in which Apatow’s fondness for conventions both rom-com and social seemed at odds with the aesthetic, morals, and comic energy of his collaborator. For the finalé of Girls Season 2, Apatow served as co-writer, and his influence was hugely apparent: the season climaxing with two women being rescued from mental illness by their ex-boyfriends; one, the show’s star, being literally carried in a heroic man’s arms.
TV viewership is full of ’shipping dreams and romantic hopes for characters, but seeing Apatow pushing towards forced feelgood seemed at odds with Girls, a show at its best when depicting people who are complete pricks. I can’t imagine, for example, a single viewer watching in the hopes that the insufferable Marnie will find happiness. It was a moment of rom-com-climax that the show soon pushed back against, or forgot; these instances of romantic triumph soon revealed as delusion or disaster.
But Trainwreck, as standalone piece of cinema, has no chance to complicate or contradict the stultifying convention of its end. Instead, what we get is a journey that’s pretty depressing for anyone who’s looked at — or up to — Schumer as a genuine show-biz subversive. After an earlier sequence in which her character mocks New York Knicks cheerleaders, at climax she swallows her foolish feminist ideals, and dons a miniskirt for a showstopping, on-the-jumbotron routine to win back her man.
It’s both unfunny and unromantic, but, beyond that, it also seems sad; the symbolism in the hyper-feminisation/sexualisation of her aboutface undeniable, troubling. In the end, Trainwreck exhibits the kind of moralising absent from Schumer’s comic persona and TV series, teaching her finger-wagging, society-knows-best lessons about cleaning up, going straight, pairing off, and normalising. Her character undergoes these not out of some seeming personal desire, but because of expectations; Trainwreck conforming to trope and type rather than bucking against them.
