Without a doubt, this is the Summer of Amy Schumer. Her Comedy Central show lights up social media feeds like a Christmas tree every week, her speeches are the stuff of which female empowerment dreams are made, and her tweets are analyzed as if they were the National Debt. Now, with “Trainwreck,” she’s starring in a Judd Apatow-directed feature film that she also wrote, at least partly based on her own experiences.
Case in point: thirtysomething New Yorker Amy stars as thirtysomething New Yorker Amy, though she is a writer for a Maxim-style magazine rather than a stand-up comic. The film begins as her father, played by the perpetually indignant Colin Quinn, is explaining to his tweens Amy and Kim why he’s divorcing their mother: “Repeat after me, girls: Monogamy is unrealistic.” Cut to a present-day montage in which obedient daughter Amy behaves promiscuously, gets wasted, and wakes up in a stranger’s bed in Staten Island. On her ferry ride of shame, clad in a gold micro-mini, she splays her arms at the bow of the ship in the wannest of homages to “The Titanic.” Roll the opening credits!
It’s a brilliant beginning – everything we’d hope for in Schumer’s first feature – and if the rest of this film followed suit, she’d be king of the world. But while “Trainwreck” is hardly true to its title, it suffers from an identity crisis that dulls the acuity that makes the comedian the toast of water coolers everywhere. Chalk it up to an uneasy marriage between Schumer’s glass-ceiling-shattering riffs, which may be best suited to stand-up and short skits, and the “Apatow Agenda” – that is, family values delivered via boot shoot. Continue Reading →
