Just last week I had a conversation with my friend Jason (of Jay and Ross Talk Shit) about the “chick flick” genre. My argument was that it was the only genre actually defined by being “bad.” If a film involves a female protagonist finding the man of her dreams, almost losing him, and winning him over at the end, but the characters are awful, it’s a “chick flick.” But if you make the same movie with interesting, funny, and relatable characters, then it’s a “romantic comedy,” but not a “chick flick.”
Case in point: Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new film, Trainwreck. Despite Schumer’s reputation for progressive and ground-breaking comedy sketches, Trainwreck absolutely follows a standard romantic comedy arc. However, because Schumer’s script always takes care to treat its characters as actual human beings with understandable worldviews, and because it is frequently hilarious, nobody would dare slap it with the dreaded “chick flick” label.
It also helps that Trainwreck is aware of the genre cliches, and often finds ways to poke fun at them. One of my personal favorites is the weirdly pervasive “man-talks-to-his-friends-about-his-relationship-while-playing-basketball” scene. Trainwreck contains this very scene, but because Bill Hader’s character is a successful athletic surgeon, his friend is LeBron James. The scene plays out largely as expected, with Hader venting about his troubles while James slaps away every shot attempt and constantly steals the ball from him. It’s not a full-on satire of the genre (for that, see David Wain’s excellent They Came Together), but it’s just silly enough to elevate the sequence.
Speaking of Bill Hader and LeBron James, they are both terrific here. James in particular is a revelation, handily delivering some of the film’s very best lines and stealing most of the scenes he is in. There are a number of times where it seems clear that a scene, as written, has ended, yet we’re still watching because his continued interplay with Hader or Schumer is so hilarious that Judd Apatow could not bring himself to take it out of the film.
Meanwhile, Bill Hader continues to prove that he is the right man for any comic role given to him. Sometimes I find myself wondering why and how Hader manages to be in nearly every comedy movie and TV show I watch. Then I’ll watch his newest performance and wonder how anybody else gets work at all. He may have gotten his gig on Saturday Night Live because of his ability to do impressions of famous figures, but his versatility extends to creating and embodying fictional characters as well. He’s a comic chameleon and one of the most dependably great performers working today.
Finally, Amy Schumer herself is excellent here, playing a role with huge range. Her script requires her to frequently vacillate between instigating comedy as the titular “trainwreck” and playing the straight woman in some incredibly awkward scenes. One that comes to mind in particular is her sex scene with John Cena. Cena is the one driving the scene, with hilariously ridiculous dialogue about fitness and his repressed homosexuality, but Schumer’s reactions are the funniest parts of the sequence. She can control the audience’s perception of a scene even without driving it herself.
Schumer also gets to show her dramatic chops in a subplot about her father. While this plotline sometimes feels slightly disconnected from the rest of the story, it grounds Amy’s character in something human and relatable. Despite her early inclinations toward using men as disposable playthings, we already know that she is capable of caring deeply for another human being, even if she has yet to realize it herself.
All this is to say that Trainwreck is very good at what it is trying to do. Despite what some may assume, it has little interest in actually subverting the romantic comedy genre, and is more content to simply be a great example of it. It contains all the cheese that the genre can muster up, but also a wit and awareness that is often missing. It is a big step forward for Amy Schumer, who proves her worth as a screenwriter and lead actress, and for Judd Apatow, who proves that he can helm a female-centric romantic comedy just as well as he did his male-centric films in the mid-aughts.