Trainwreck makes Schumer a star and puts Apatow back on track

To get to what’s good — in fact, very good — about Amy Schumer’s coming-out as both big-screen star and solely credited screenwriter, let’s first dispense with what’s less than good. It’s not a long list, but it’s rife with the sort of distracting lapses that relationship-phobes such as those depicted in Trainwreck refer to as “deal breakers.”

Viewers who demand stylistic or tonal consistency, for instance, are sure to notice that Schumer’s character-introducing voice-over comes on strong, returns when it’s not needed, and then disappears altogether.

Professionals in the medical and publishing communities seem unlikely to recognize or approve of the ways their vocations are conducted here. (NBA players benefit more without achieving greater verisimilitude.)

Judd Apatow fans and skeptics seem bound to quarrel equally with his direction of Trainwreck, which mutes certain notes that demand exclamation while, as usual, dragging out a few too lightly conceived sequences. At just over two hours, this is the comedy impresario’s shortest film in a while. After the lumbering This Is 40, that counts as a victory, at least until the DVD resurrects the inevitable outtakes and alternate scenes.

Trainwreck‘s plot — promiscuous, lightly alcoholic young career woman finds unlikely love with nerd-hot doctor — is rote in its romantic-comedy paces, and its morality (any such funny-love story requires a moral compass to tamper with) is far more conventional than the low-judgment early gags suggest. Those jokes (a couple of them dependent on that vanishing voice-over) are the movie’s surest, mostly because they hew most closely to the cheerfully ribald sensibility of Inside Amy Schumer, the Comedy Central show that has made Schumer a justifiably everywhere-at-once cultural presence. But after a smart start, the movie’s machinery relies on reversing the romantic-comedy gender roles — hardly a revolutionary stroke. And from the director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and a comic as relevant as Schumer, making the woman a sexually voracious slob and the man an understanding grown-up feels distressingly shopworn — even if the idea trades on Schumer’s established persona.

“I’m probably, like, 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want,” she recently told a fancy audience while accepting a Trailblazer Award at Glamour U.K.’s Women of the Year ceremony. Almost nothing in Trainwreck is that offhand in its desire to shock — or that funny.

Yet, ultimately, these are quibbles. Fresh, Trainwreck is not. But it’s funny in ways that linger past what a little more shock or novelty might have delivered. Somehow, it makes playing by the old romantic-comedy rules seem like a good idea.

One reason that Trainwreck is the year’s most satisfying comedy so far is its casting, which updates those bygone rules more than rewriting them. Whatever else Schumer is — an eyebrow archer perhaps more than a true fire starter — she’s a genuine actress (and a writer unselfish about sharing fine moments with good co-stars). And there’s genius in deploying former Saturday Night Live chameleon Bill Hader as the male lead. On the surface, he’s working the finicky-smart-guy end of a fairly familiar spectrum, but he also makes a believable character out of some funny lines and is more than just Schumer’s straight man. Everyone else (two words: Tilda Swinton) appears to be having a pretty good time, too, and, as corny as it sounds, the results are infectious.

Corn is Trainwreck‘s secret fuel. The thing works as few recent romantic comedies have because it tries so hard to work as more romantic comedies used to — for starters, by being open about trying at all. Its makers and its characters alike are effortful people, even when they’re being accused of that most modern deal breaker, conspicuous underachievement. The Woody Allen-style montage contains spoken reference to Woody Allen, played for light irony yet also lovingly rendered, and the movie as a whole feels open-hearted, despite its characters’ indulging the occasional flight of meanness.

Then again, the new rule book is written mean. We’re past anyone being old-fashioned now — Cary Grant never said, or was told, “Fuck you,” and why should he have put up with that? The rest of us, far from Cary Grant-ness, learn early to forgive more. Which is why the romantic comedies we like best have always told us how we say we’re sorry now, not how we say I love you.