I Feel Pretty

“Change your mind, change your life!” shouts the spin class instruc­tor in Abby Kohn and Marc Sil­ver­stein​’s I Feel Pret­ty – but this is advice that self-loathing Renee (Amy Schumer) per­haps takes a lit­tle too seri­ous­ly. After falling off her exer­cise bike dur­ing class and bump­ing her head, Renee believes she’s been trans­formed into the sex­i­est woman alive. Believ­ing her wildest fan­ta­sy has come true, she uses her new­found con­fi­dence to apply for her dream job as a recep­tion­ist at the Fifth Avenue HQ of fic­tion­al make­up brand, Lily LeClaire. 

How­ev­er, in a short-sight­ed move, the film seem­ing­ly con­flates low income with low self-esteem. Work­ing on a ​‘dif­fu­sion line’ for bud­get shop­pers, the company’s CEO, Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams with a squeaky voice), enlists Renee to pro­vide insight into this mar­ket. It’s sug­gest­ed that this knowl­edge comes auto­mat­i­cal­ly with her fail­ure to con­form to con­ven­tion­al stan­dards of beau­ty. Had this flaw been ironed out, we might have been more invest­ed in Renee’s pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess as a cham­pi­on for the everyman.

The film’s low stakes plot leaves space for a pro­gres­sive and thought­ful con­tem­pla­tion on body image, but this is nev­er ful­ly deliv­ered. Instead the film fills this void with for­mu­la­ic jokes where Renee crude­ly express­es her unwa­ver­ing con­fi­dence – check­ing her­self out, parad­ing around naked – while oth­er char­ac­ters either dis­ap­prove or admire her. It’s a for­mu­la that, in com­bi­na­tion with Amy Schumer’s com­mit­ment, does gen­er­ate laughs, but this rehash­ing grows tire­some over the course of the film.

Renee’s gen­uine and sen­si­tive love inter­est, Ethan (Rory Scov­el), is one of the film’s suc­cess­es. The explo­ration of his inse­cu­ri­ties, as well as Renee’s, sheds light on the equal­ly dam­ag­ing effects of male stereo­typ­ing and is a refresh­ing addi­tion to the nar­ra­tive. Renee’s best friends, Jane (Busy Philipps) and Vivian (Aidy Bryant) also foil her super­fi­cial­i­ty and pro­vide exam­ples of women who val­ue their per­son­al­i­ties above all else.

Yet Renee’s pro­gres­sion to self-accep­tance is punc­tu­at­ed not by the real­is­tic tack­ling of inse­cu­ri­ties, but by the sin­gle rev­e­la­tion that she looked the same, before and after her head trau­ma. Changes in her self-image still stem from the val­i­da­tion that oth­er peo­ple believe she is beau­ti­ful and intel­li­gent, rather than her per­son­al growth. It’s a small dis­tinc­tion, but for a film attempt­ing to speak about such a wide­ly relat­able and impor­tant issue, this neglect leads to an iron­i­cal­ly shal­low finale.