Train­wreck

Essen­tial­ly an Amer­i­can remake of Amélie that swaps Mar­seilles for Man­hat­tan, Audrey Tautou for Amy Schumer, and whim­sy for sex jokes, Train­wreck is both the best roman­tic com­e­dy of the year as well as its most crush­ing disappointment.

Star and scribe Amy Schumer is a ris­ing force whose brand has been defined by side-eyed fem­i­nist humour and a ruth­less skew­er­ing of gen­der rep­re­sen­ta­tions in the media. Judd Apa­tow is the cinema’s poet lau­re­ate of man-chil­dren. Train­wreck isn’t a bat­tle of the sex­es so much as a meet­ing of the minds, but the osten­si­ble dis­par­i­ty between the guid­ing voic­es of this col­lab­o­ra­tion (along with the fact that this is the first time Apa­tow has direct­ed some­body else’s script), has fore­ground­ed ques­tions of author­ship. When Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios decid­ed to blitz sub­ways, bus stops and web sites with ads that read ​“From the guy who brought you Brides­maids’, the claim felt as loaded as it did mis­lead­ing (if Brides­maids was brought to you by only one guy, that guy was prob­a­bly Paul Feig).

Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, Train­wreck doesn’t belong to either Apa­tow or Schumer, it belongs to the col­lec­tive his­to­ry of the severe­ly famil­iar genre from which it spawned, and for all of the com­ic alche­my promised by this Avengers-like alliance of com­ic titans, Train­wreck is the most con­ven­tion­al movie that Judd Apa­tow has ever made.

Schumer plays Amy Townsend, a mod­ern New York woman who was raised not to believe in the mag­ic of monogamy – a hacky pro­logue, set dur­ing Amy’s child­hood, finds her new­ly divorced father (Col­in Quinn) forc­ing his two young daugh­ters to repeat, ​“Monogamy isn’t real­is­tic,” like a mantra. Cut to Amy’s adult­hood, where that mantra has metas­ta­sised into a self-ful­fill­ing prophecy.

A per­pet­u­al­ly sin­gle woman for whom a walk of shame is the most fre­quent mode of trans­porta­tion, Amy is – to bor­row a phrase from the film’s Ger­man title – a ​“Dat­ing Queen.” She loves sex (or the finite rela­tion­ship it pro­vides) almost as much as she hates inti­ma­cy (or the abstract con­nec­tion it entails), and her com­mit­ment to that fuck-and-run lifestyle is so deeply engrained in her sense of self that she resents her younger sis­ter (Brie Lar­son) for get­ting mar­ried and rais­ing a kid.

The film doesn’t judge Amy for that, and nei­ther should we, but she clear­ly isn’t hap­py. On the con­trary, she’s an expert in the Apa­towian art of self-sab­o­tage, care­ful to accept the love she thinks she deserves and nev­er make her­self avail­able to any­thing more than that. Like most rom-com hero­ines, Amy is a jour­nal­ist who works at a mag­a­zine of ques­tion­able qual­i­ty, and like most rom-com hero­ines, she falls in love with the sub­ject of her lat­est sto­ry (in this case a promi­nent sports doc­tor named Aaron, whose played by a win­some­ly ground­ed Bill Had­er). What sets Train­wreck apart from the rest of its ilk is that Amy doesn’t throw her­self at the feet of her love inter­est, nor is Aaron the cat­a­lyst that sparks her per­son­al growth – if any­thing, he’s a human yield sign, encour­ag­ing the hero­ine to reassess her situation.

The film’s shag­gy plot, which refresh­ing­ly hinges on abstract per­son­al growth rather than a con­trived series of inci­dents, chron­i­cles Amy’s jour­ney towards embrac­ing her own self-worth, and expe­ri­enc­ing how that man­i­fests in her love life. If that sounds a bit Hall­mark, note that there are not one, but two sep­a­rate jokes in the movie that com­pare someone’s gen­i­tal sit­u­a­tion to a scene from Game of Thrones.

As the open­ing scene makes clear, most of Amy’s issues stem from her father, and the rela­tion­ship between those two char­ac­ters is end­less­ly more inter­est­ing than the one that per­co­lates between she and Aaron. Schumer’s father was diag­nosed with mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis when she was nine, and Quinn’s fic­tive ver­sion – who suf­fers from the same inflam­ma­to­ry dis­ease, and moves into an assist­ed liv­ing facil­i­ty ear­ly in the film – is ten­der­ly imbued with the sub­tle details of sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence. Quinn, who isn’t exact­ly known for his nuanced dra­mat­ic per­for­mances, deliv­ers a turn so lived-in and true that you hard­ly even notice that his neigh­bour at the nurs­ing home is played by 100-year-old screen leg­end Nor­man Lloyd (whose first role was in 1942’s Sabo­teur!).

The rest of the film’s enor­mous sup­port­ing cast is sim­i­lar­ly unpre­dictable. Til­da Swin­ton, who’s scar­i­ly real­is­tic as Amy’s bronzed and mer­ci­less edi­tor-in-chief, nev­er­the­less feels out of sync with Apatow’s rhythm – her mate­r­i­al is well beneath her tal­ent, and most of her dia­logue is deliv­ered like she’s look­ing for approval from behind the cam­era. Else­where, in a sur­pris­ing­ly sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance that’s almost wor­thy of the atten­tion it’s sure to receive, LeBron James plays a sen­si­tive ver­sion of him­self as Aaron’s client and con­fi­dant, putting a nice spin on the typ­i­cal­ly female best friend trope.

Still, almost every­thing that makes Train­wreck spe­cial can be traced back to Quinn’s char­ac­ter, who pro­vides the film an emo­tion­al bedrock and grounds Schumer’s pro­tag­o­nist when­ev­er she threat­ens to spi­ral towards the obliv­ion of car­i­ca­ture. Which is often. Schumer has great poten­tial as an actress, but the same qual­i­ties that make her such a force on her sketch com­e­dy show make for a stilt­ed and over­ly man­nered per­for­mance that nev­er allows for Amy to cohere into any­thing more than an incon­gru­ous series of dry reac­tions. Each sketch on her fre­quent­ly bril­liant tele­vi­sion show allows her to step into a new char­ac­ter and start with a blank slate, but Train­wreck finds her strug­gling to sus­tain an emo­tion­al through-line, and the trans­paren­cy with which she hunts for a laugh or tries to land a sen­ti­men­tal note rubs against the semi-impro­vised nat­u­ral­ism that defines Apatow’s style.

And make no mis­take: regard­less as to whom Train­wreck belongs, it cer­tain­ly feels like a Judd Apa­tow movie. Indul­gent, sweet, and staged with all the visu­al panache of a sit­com (albeit a sit­com shot on 35mm by Martha Mar­cy May Mar­lene cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jody Lee Lipes), the film doesn’t find the Knocked Up direc­tor step­ping for­ward or side­ways so much as rock­ing a new wardrobe and stand­ing in place. Train­wreck is no dis­as­ter – but in the wake of the much short­er and infi­nite­ly more sat­is­fy­ing ​‘12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer’, it nev­er feels like it even leaves the station.