TRAINWRECK: Amy & Judd’s Confusing Collision

In Britain we have only just heard of Amy Schumer. But even having seen none of her work and only the rare interview I knew I would love this lady, and when I spotted Trainwreck on the horizon I got very excited. Then, I backtracked. Judd Apatow would be directing this film? I like Judd Apatow films as much as the next person, but he does have the tendency to cast his female characters in a poor light. They are whiny and, ultimately, cause trouble for the male protagonist. So the idea of putting together the questionable misogyny of Apatow’s direction with Schumer’s feminist thinking put me on the back foot. Then as events unfolded and the film found its way around the globe many people discovered what I was soon to, that Trainwreck is a bit of a mess.

What’s Good

Before I unpack the myriad ways in which Trainwreck is problematic I’ll let you know what’s good about it. First of all, Schumer is. She’s sharp and witty, and her writing (for the most part) has a lot of promise. She has made an admirable attempt at writing a comedy, but also at portraying serious issues. Albeit they are muddied together. The supporting cast are pretty good, with Alison Brie and Mike Birbiglia as Amy’s sister and brother-in-law, and Tilda Swinton as her acerbic boss. Bill Hader as boyfriend Aaron is superb, and it’s really wonderful to see him play a romantic lead. On the surface Trainwreck is quite a pleasant watch, but its multitude of faults soon become glaringly obvious.

What’s Bad

The problem is with Trainwreck is that it contains, in total, about three completely different films. They are all going on at the same time, fighting to entertain you, and fighting to be right. Let’s take film number 1:

The Feminist Comedy

What we were all expecting from Amy Schumer’s script was a strong, mature female response to being an independent woman in the modern age. Her character Amy does what she wants. She sleeps around, she drinks too much. But it’s her choice, we’re happy to support her in it and laugh about it. Laugh because this is the kind of comedy we would expect: a woman who sleeps around finding someone she actually likes, and changing for the better. (Critics have called her change an attempt to fit her into a misogynistic ideal, but there are more than a few films that feature guys in a similar scenario).

But it doesn’t quite work out that way. What should have occurred was that Amy would have the stereotypical response to commitment, she would have run away, but then ultimately she would have worked out what Aaron meant to her and it would have been happily ever after. And this sort of happens. Except that the film realises early on that it’s not okay that Amy sleeps around, and drinks too much. This is when film number 2 jumps in:

The Cautionary Tale

Underneath all of Schumer’s jokes and physical comedy there is a greater story, one of a woman who has been confused by her father and is clearly still hurting from the death of her mother. She sleeps around, because she’s learnt to treat men the way her father treats women. She’s also something of an alcoholic and has a problem with drugs. These facts are way out in the background of the film, dealt with so shallowly that they are joked about, and we laugh heartily. Until about halfway through the second act. Then it becomes quite serious and quite sad. It’s as though Schumer realised that the romantic comedy aspect wasn’t working for her and she decided to go deep into a character she hadn’t set up that well. This is something she might have been able to pull this off, if it wasn’t the ham-fisted comedy of film number 3:

The Guys Film

I may have forgiven Schumer for turning her back on the anti-romcom beginnings that the film starts with and diving into the problems of grief and substance abuse, if it wasn’t for the wealth of stupid, inappropriate jokes that are scattered across this film. Don’t get me wrong, Schumer is Queen of the inappropriate joke. But here, it feels like she’s trying to write for guys. And not normal guys, but some kind of stereotype that Hollywood markets to. Dopey guys who enjoy jokes about sex and homosexuality. Everything, from the badly drawn character of Steven (John Cena) to the unartful introduction of “girls don’t know sports” jokes just don’t belong in the film she’s trying to write. They reflect badly on the character of Amy and make this easygoing girl seem like a bit of a bitch, and not at all like the woman Schumer was trying to create.

Shaky Foundations

Schumer is such a talented writer that Trainwreck could never have never been a bad script, but it is an incredibly confused one. Even if you ignore the confused themes, as mentioned above, a lot of the incidents in this film just don’t make sense. Like why is Amy dating Steven? They seriously don’t match up. Why is Amy working at this men’s magazine that does very crass articles alongside meaningful pieces about sports medicine?

In fact, why does this film spend so much time discussing sports medicine but then completely skims over the six weeks in which Amy and Aaron are falling in love? (When she has no problem being monogamous?). Lastly, her dad taught her monogamy didn’t work, but when did he teach her to be such a bitch to guys? Trainwreck just doesn’t make sense. It’s as though it was written by a few different people. The flaws were there to begin with, but I think it probably took Judd Apatow to bang the nail into the coffin.

Amy Vs. Judd

If it’s because some parts of Trainwreck seem like they were made with guys in mind I wonder if this is because of Apatow’s direction. It would be easy for someone to draw out certain aspects of this script in order to make it play to men. You just have to make a big silly joke out of Steven’s sexuality and downplay Amy’s difficulty with her boss, make it more about the jokes and less about the emotion. This is, of course, a stereotypical idea of what Hollywood think men want, along with the distracting slew of athletes-come-actors that the producers felt the need to cast: “you know like the way dudes will probably got bored with this film? Well, let’s put in some sports guys to distract them? Guys like sports right?”.

This film has sparked off a blame game. Mainly people blame Apatow for branding the film with his trademark tidying away of women and their eccentricities, while some even blame Schumer for somehow undermining and making serious what should have been a fun Apatow movie. But I think they’re both to blame. Schumer created a script that by turns trivialises then makes serious her character’s problems, and Apatow chose not to sympathise with that character.

Conclusion

I apologise if this review in anyway confused you, but Trainwreck is that sort of film. It can be entertaining at points, it has a good story and is quite amusing. But the absolute confusing mess of themes, the lack of character continuity and the tiresome internal argument it has over what a woman can or can’t be is exhausting.

At the end of the day I don’t know why I expected anything different, because from the moment I heard that Judd Apatow was going to direct a Amy Schumer script I thought: “and how exactly does Judd plan on packing Amy into his carefully constructed female stereotype”?. Of course he couldn’t, and he didn’t. That maybe is the problem here. Apatow saw, in Trainwreck, something that Schumer clearly hadn’t written, and Amy herself didn’t know what she wanted this film to be. So the result is that the whole film is a war of opinions over the character of Amy. And that is a damn shame.

What did you think of Trainwreck?

Trainwreck is out in cinemas almost everywhere, though it’s yet to be released in a few countries – for those opening dates, check here.

[Note: A lot of the scenes in this trailer aren’t actually even in the film. Now, come to think of it, this trailer is completely oblivious to all the serious problems that emerge halfway through the film. So it’s actually quite misleading.]

(top image source: Universal Studios)