Trainwreck Is a Success, Almost

Two adorable young girls sit on the hood of a car, with a defeated middle-aged man complaining about the world to them. This is how Trainwreck opens, a father telling his daughters “monogamy is unrealistic”. It’s an excellent scene that sets the tone for when the movie jumps 23 years to present day. We see one of the daughters, Amy (played by Amy Schumer, who also wrote the film) party and sleep with her choice of the many men in New York. Her sister Kim (Brie Larson) chose a different life path, and settled down to marry a dorky but sweet guy named Tom (Mike Birbiglia) and started a family.

The first hour of this film is as well done a comedy I’ve seen in a while, and certainly this year. Each scene made me laugh hard at least once. Amy is a journalist for a men’s magazine in Manhattan, and in a hilarious pitch-meeting scene gets stuck with the assignment of profiling a big time sports surgeon named Aaron Conners (Bill Hader). Their first appointment goes poorly with Amy coming off as judgmental. Schumer and Hader bounce off of each other well, and the scene is strong. That night she is dumped by her sort-of boyfriend Steven (John Cena), a gym freak whose far more into her than she is he. This was the one truly weak scene of the first hour, the film strongly hints that Steven is gay and shows very little to make us believe he cared for Amy this much.

Throughout all of this Amy and Kim are packing up their fathers (Colin Quinn) house as he is now in an old person home, and their differing views of him cause conflict between them. Amy loves their father, while Kim resents him for how he treated them and their mother. After a couple of bumpy interviews, Aaron and Amy end up getting drinks and have sex (where she breaks her rule by spending the night). Aaron makes much more of the evening than Amy, but Amy soon falls for him when he drops everything to help her father with an injury

***Spoilers From Here On Out***

Up to this point I was in love with this film, it was sweet and charming without slipping on joke quality. However it couldn’t keep this up in the second hour, starting with the major emotional turning point; Amy and Kim’s father passes away. At his funeral, Amy delivers a teary and powerful eulogy. Schumer was excellent here, managing to make all of us feel sadness for a character that had been hard to like at any point.

A couple days later Amy misses a big speech Aaron gives which leads to a huge fight, making Aaron have to delay an important surgery, and then the couple breaking up. There were a few good jokes and gags during the fight (Bill Hader struggling to stay awake particularly stood out), but something was lacking. Since neither of these two had really been developed as characters it was hard to see why they are together, or more particularly, we hadn’t seen why Aaron loved Amy.

Amy then gets drunk and attempts to sleep with the magazine’s intern. Unbeknownst to her the intern is still a minor, which leads to her getting fired. This whole sequence was just uncomfortable, but even more than uncomfortable it was unentertaining. We then watch LeBron James (who plays Aaron’s good friend) hold an intervention to convince Aaron to get Amy back. This scene was painfully unfunny and just boring.

The movie concludes with Amy cleaning up her apartment, mainly throwing out bottles of alcohol, and getting her profile of Aaron published in Vanity Fair. She sends a copy to his office, and performs a dance with the Knick City Dancers for him at a game he was attending, ending with the two of them together again. It was cheesy, but it was very cute and funny and as an ending it certainly wasn’t bad.

Overall I think the good in this movie definitely outweighed the not so good. The first hour was excellent. The second hour had some really low points, but it was still mostly okay. It could have probably been 20 minutes shorter, or reused that time to actually explain the motivations of the secondary characters and Amy and Aarons relationship. It was also surprising that for a movie built on the premise of the lead being a “Trainwreck”, Amy never really seems like a mess. She appears to have her life together, but just has no intention of settling down romantically, that’s hardly a “Trainwreck”. The problem the movie faced was it tried to do too many things, and because it spread itself out so much, it never built one strong story. It was a movie about the different ways children react to the same parenting lesson, as well as a story of someone fixing themselves up, and also a very basic romantic comedy.

The last two points surprised me, considering that Schumer is a comedian known for being out of the box, I didn’t expect the story to be one I’ve seen many times before. That’s not a bad thing, the classic romantic comedy is still a time tested and strong formula, but this film didn’t really build up its couple well enough to fulfill that goal. Despite that I thought this movie accomplished its goal, I laughed hard and often and enjoyed watching it.

|