“I don’t really like to spoon,” says a panicked Amy (Amy Schumer), while being persuaded by her new boyfriend (Bill Hader) to spend the night. “If 𓃲I stay, can we sleep in a realistic position?”
I’m sure it will b🎶e said that Schumer is playing the guy role in “Trainwreck,” written by her and directed by Judd Apatow, who’s f🐭ound his groove collaborating with funny ladies. But that’s not the subversive thing about this film; rather, it’s the vulnerable, emotionally available men at its center.
Hade💞r, sweet, goofy and down-to-earth, seems poised to be this generation’s Tom Hanks. As Amy’s so-right-it’s-pai𒀰nful love interest, sports doctor Aaron Conners, he sidesteps her manic commitment-phobia with comebacks like, “Well, I think we really like each other and we should start dating.”
LeBron James, playing himself, is Aaron’s sensitive best friend, who interrogates Am🌊y thusly: “Do you hear his name when you listen to the wind?” Even wrestler John Cena, as a no-necked Mr. Wrong, is crushed wheꦍn Amy ends things: He so wanted her to be his Crossfit Queen.
Schumer, meanwhile, continues her ascent toward unseating Louis CK as America’s top comic. She’s written herself a hell of a prickly role, a woman who🍬’s internalized the early lessons of her absentee dad (Colin Quinn): “What if I told you there was only one doll you could play with forever?” he asks his young daughters, by way of informing them he was leaving their mother.
In Amy’s adulthood, this plays out as a string of hookups — enabled by a capacity for drinking herself into believing they’re good ideas — though she’s hardly the disaster the title implies. She works as a writer at a men’s magazine, S’Nuff, where a near-unrecognizable Tilda Swinton plays her boss, a tanned shark whose sole sustenance seems to be misogynist story pitcඣhes (“Are You Gay, or Is She Just Boring?”). Vanessa Bayer (“SNL”) plays Amy’s work friend, and the two are a united front of over-reactionary female singledom. When Aaron calls to ask Amy for a second date, he’s immediately deemed a deranged stalker.
She needles her sister Kim (Brie Larson) about her dorky husband (Mike Birbiglia) and🔯 mannered stepson (Evan Brinkman) and, early on, she cheats on a guy she’s seeing (Cena) with countless other men. She’s kind of a jerk, which puts her firmly in the tradition of the rom-com dude — a witty misanthrope who can be reformed through the love of a virtuous significant other.
But this is Apatow country, which means family and order triumph. I found myself wishing Amy’s singleness, and shameless non-monogamy, didn’t have to be chalked up to fatherly indoctrination and solved like a problem. In the grand scheme, though, “Trainwreck” is a corrective to a lot of outdated clichés. It’s very funny an✃d sweet and even a little weepy, and it has maybe the best scene ever filmed of dirty talk gone wrong. In other words, it’s a Sc🐈humer/Apatow production — may there be more of them to come.