Trainwreck

In Trainwreck, our attention is supposed to be focused on Amy Schumer, the TV comedian who stars in the film and wrote it as well.  However, my attention was mainly focused on Bill Hader, the former Saturday Night Live star who plays Schumer's love interest.  After his surprisingly nuanced performance in last year's The Skeleton Twins and now this, Hader is shaping up to be an actor to watch closely.

Schumer is very good too, though to be honest, I liked her better in this movie when she isn't trying to desperately shock or gross us out.  She has a natural comic talent here, and can often be very funny.  But she also often goes for broke, and doesn't get as many laughs as she may be trying for.  The character that she plays is also named Amy, and though it's not exactly autobiographical, there are some elements that both the actress and the character she plays share.  The Amy that is up on the screen is a boozing, pot-smoking caricature that makes Ted, the foul-mouthed teddy bear from the Seth McFarlane movies, seem subtle in comparison.  She spends half of her life sleeping around with a wide variety of men that she picks up in bars almost every night, and the other half working for a men's magazine where articles with topics like "Are you bored with your wife, or are you just gay?" are pitched to the magazine's editor (Tilda Swinton), who seems to be channeling the Meryl Streep character from The Devil Wears Prada. 

If there's one thing this movie shows is that Schumer has no problem with showing us the worst sides of the character she plays.  She is frequently drunk, hungover, in embarrassing sexual situations (there is a funny scene where she tries to get her muscle-bound simple-minded boyfriend to talk dirty to her during sex), or projectile vomits.  Again, Schumer shows a talent here, but a lot of the shock humor isn't as funny as the movie seems to think it is.  Amy and her younger sister, Kim (Brie Larson), were taught by their father as little girls that "monogamy doesn't work", and he drilled that idea into his daughters' heads.  Now in the present, Kim is happily married and expecting her first child (her husband already has a son from another marriage), their father (Colin Quinn) is in a medical home battling MS, and Amy herself has taken her father's words to heart, and refuses to settle down with a single man.

That changes when Amy is assigned to write an article for the magazine about a doctor who works with professional athletes and their injuries.  Aaron Conners (Bill Hader).  Aaron has an awkward, kind of geeky charm that instantly appeals to Amy, even though she won't admit it at first.  He's completely different from all the other men in her life, in that he is smart, respectful, and actually interested in her for reasons that don't involve sex.  As Amy and Aaron start to come together, and a relationship between them seems possible, the movie starts to find its focus and I started to enjoy it more.  While the scenes depicting Amy's wild party lifestyle had some laughs, the movie seemed somewhat rambling and too intent on shocking us instead of entertaining us.  Once Aaron enters the story, the movie does take a more conventional romantic comedy approach, but one that doesn't seem lame or forced.

Like a lot of R-rated comedies aimed at adults, Trainwreck wants to shock us at first, but then it eventually wants us to warm up to the characters and sympathize with them.  This approach seldom works, but it does here, because I think Schumer finally gets a grasp on her character.  She stops trying to go for broad laughs non stop, and starts actually developing a character with emotions.  There are some surprisingly effective dramatic scenes between Amy and her family (particularly her father) that I will not reveal here, but gives the film a level of maturity and nuance that I was not expecting.  This is also the part where the movie finally started to come together for me.  Schumer and Hader have great on screen chemistry, and Schumer has written a strong starring role for herself, which not only gets to show her comedic skills, but also her acting ability.  Like I said, she did base certain elements of her character and her family in the film on her own life, so there is some honesty behind the film.

As good as the film's two lead stars are, the big surprise here is basketball superstar, LeBron James, who has a fairly large supporting role as himself, who is good friends with the Aaron Conners character.  He shows a wonderful gift of comic timing and line delivery, as sometimes just hearing how he delivers a line can bring laughs.  He's not just a sports celebrity making an extended cameo here.  He's giving a genuinely funny comedic performance that ranks as one of the better ones I've seen this year.  I actually wouldn't mind seeing him tackling some other roles in the future.  He shares a number of his scenes with Bill Hader, and can pretty much match the comic veteran in every scene they're in together.  Speaking of Hader, he makes for a surprisingly likable romantic lead, and not only shares a great deal of chemistry with his female co-star, but has great screen presence on his own.

This is somewhat of a sloppy movie, that didn't really seem to be going anywhere early on, but gradually won my attention.  By the end, I had fallen for the characters, and wanted to see them get together.  But most of all, by the time it was over, I really just wanted it to end.  Like a lot of recent comedies, this movie seems far longer than it needs to be.  Part of this is expected, since the film's director is Judd Apatow, a filmmaker who makes good movies, but really needs an editor.  There's quite a bit of useless fluff in this film that could have easily been cut to make it shorter.  The scene that immediately comes to mind that should have ended up on the cutting room floor is a late scene where a bunch of celebrities show up for no reason, and try to stage a "love intervention" for Hader's character.  The scene goes on too long, is not that funny, and seems to exist simply because a few famous people happened to be visiting the set that day.  This is one of those movies that is good now, but might have been better with a slightly leaner running time.

Regardless, Trainwreck did manage to win me over as it went along, and that is the important thing.  The movie starts off kind of messy and raunchy, but it ends on a kind of dorky sweet note that is self aware, and even manages to have a little bit of fun with some romantic comedy cliches, such as having one of the lovers running across the city in order to be with the other after an argument threatens to split them up.  This is not a perfect comedy, but it works well enough as a star vehicle for Amy Schumer, and I think this movie shows she has more than enough talent to carry another film.

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