Judd Apatow’s latest comedy stars and is written by Amy Schumer, currently feted as the most raunchily outspoken woman in American entertainment. She plays Amy, a journalist and bacchanalian free spirit with a deep distrust of monogamy who begins to rethink her life after falling for Aaron (Bill Hader), a somewhat buttoned-up sports doctor.
Trainwreck contains some bracingly risque moments – not least Amy’s sex scene with a musclebound lunk (played with cheerful brio by wrestler-actor John Cena) who can’t help outing himself as gay with every grunted utterance. Juicily written as it is, Trainwreck doesn’t live up to the promise either of its poster (a riotous Schumer swigging from a paper-bagged bottle) or its title, however ironic it’s meant to be. Amy isn’t that much of a mess – she’s a bit cynical, gets drunk occasionally, sleeps with a varied range of guys, but all in all she’s hardly more extreme than Seinfeld’s Elaine in her heyday.
Schumer is good company here, but doesn’t play to the strengths of her standup routines, where the mixture of outrage, sang-froid delivery and mischievously cherubic looks add up to something much sharper. Hader is fun, with his cartoonishly angular face, as a gawky straitlaced type in the Jack Lemmon mould. And Tilda Swinton is very funny in yet another “As you’ve never seen her before!” transformation, playing a bottle-tanned, cockney-accented magazine editor – imagine a lightly sauteed Janet Street-Porter.
The film slightly suffers from Apatow’s characteristic taste for improv and loose structure, never quite adding up to a coherent whole. The already controversial romcom redemption of Amy’s inner “nice girl” is a big minus. But just as troubling is the way that Amy, who staunchly declares herself indifferent to sport – the ultimate American heresy – is finally made to join in and cheer with everyone else. Enjoyable enough, and certainly not a trainwreck – it just doesn’t quite clear the platform.
