Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. So, I'm getting old. When I build a festival schedule there's a delicate Beautiful Mind style algorithm going on where I have to factor in runtimes of movies, theater switches, travel time to interviews and rough guestimates on whether or not they'll run long.
This year's SXSW schedule was immaculate. I had packed in screenings and some choice interviews, had organized my schedule by location so there's a minimal amount of theater relocation and had guessed line wait times like a gosh darn pro. Everything was perfect... except for one tiny, little oversight. I didn't factor in any sleep time.
The schedule has been so packed that I haven't been able to get much writing done, so when I got home from the midnight movie that first SXSW evening and was staring down the barrel of an early morning interview with the King of Genre, Jason Blum, I realized that I had a choice between being responsible and writing up some of my movie adventures or being greedy and getting 6 hours of sleep so I could survive day two.
Being the good, adult human being that I am I chose to write. Sadly the trend continued and by day three of the fest I'd burned out. I guess I'm not as young as I once was.
That's a very, very long-winded way to tell you guys I'm in catch up mode. First on deck is a few words on the “work in progress” cut of Judd Apatow's latest: Trainwreck.
Last year they showed a work in progress screening of Neighbors and that pretty much ended up just being the movie that was released, so I'll assume that any tweaks done to Trainwreck will be similarly minute.
The quick review is that the movie's solid. Amy Schumer and Bill Hader work incredibly well together and it's clear that Schumer poured her heart and soul into this script. In terms of tone, this falls somewhere between Knocked Up and Funny People. It's not as filled with insane humor as his goofier stuff and it's not as dramatic as his more serious stuff. I mean, there are plenty of dick jokes and raunchy humor, don't get me wrong, but like most Apatow-directed movies there's a real world emotional drama at the core of it.
Amy is the title character, but she wasn't as much of a trainwreck as I expected her to be. Professionally she's on solid ground, working for a magazine (presumably one of the dozen that could afford to have a full staff of writers these days) and on the cusp of being promoted. Her personal life is a little iffier. To say Amy has commitment issues is a bit of an understatement. She's dating a very nice guy played surprisingly well by wrestler John Cena. I don't say I'm surprised because he's a wrestler, but because he's given an actual emotional range to play instead of just coasting off his ring charisma and jokes.
The problem is Ms. Amy isn't the monogamous sort and she messes around on him. You get the feeling that this dude is too nice for her to just use and throw away, so she makes an attempt at making him happy while still pursuing her basic urges in secrecy. But even that is a half-assed attempt and when she is found out she's pretty much like “Oh, yeah. Bummer. Guess we have to break up now.”
While her life may be in a constant state of moving onto the next best thing and she may hit the bottle a little more often than she should, Amy still seems to have a handle on who she is, what she wants and just does her thing. Until she meets Hader's character, a sports doctor on the verge of a knee replacement breakthrough that could be a world changer for injured athletes.
She's assigned to write a story on him, but since the only kind of magazine that could still be going at full power these days is a shitty, snarky rag Schumer is naturally there to get an inside look at the Hader's famous athlete patients, her agenda being to tear them down from a non-sports fan point of view.
In tradition rom-com fashion, she ends up kind of falling for Hader instead, but even though that's the perfect tee up for a standard rom-com movie, they don't go where you'd think they will. There is no moment where she has to decide between her shitty story or her growing love of her subject. In fact, about a half hour in the story doesn't really matter anymore and it's all about Schumer wrestling with falling in love while still having her alcohol fueled one-night stand urges.
Bill Hader is one of my favorite screen personalities these days, so getting to see him take a meatier role is probably one of the big reasons the movie worked for me so well. He comes across as an incredibly likable guy and he always has a hint of mischievousness in his eyes. Thinking back on it I think it was the mix of Amy's cynical look on love and Hader's childlike optimistic view of it that worked for me so well.
Neither character is out to “save” the other. Neither are perfect people, but they work so well together that you're pulling for them to make it in the end, which I suppose is most romantic comedy part of the whole thing. You really want these guys to work their bullshit out and let their insecurities go.
Schumer and Hader are surrounded by a hell of a cast. Of the comedian variety we have great turns by Colin Quinn, Mike Birbiglia, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park and Dave Attell (there's easily a dozen more that pop up, like Tim Meadows (!?!), but those above get some really good stuff), of the actor variety we got Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Brie Larson and the nice little guest duo of Marisa Tomei and Daniel Radcliffe and then there are the sports guys. I already mentioned John Cena, but he's not the only athlete to do well in this movie. LeBron James also plays a significant part. Unlike Cena, James is actually playing himself, but the role Schumer and Apatow crafted for him is that of Hader's protective best friend and LeBron kills it. Let's just go ahead and call this the best performance by a basketball player in a comedy since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane.
Most Apatow films have some lulls and this one isn't any different, but there's not a lot of stuff there just to be there. Every scene is concerned with showing us a little bit more about its characters or giving us a big laugh, so even in the lulls you're getting some golden character moments.
Colin Quinn is the MVP of the movie as far as I'm concerned. He plays Schumer's ailing father. In a weird way he reminded me of Denis Leary in Demolition Man. Stay with me here, I swear I didn't take a blow to the head during the fest. Leary in Demolition Man was playing a very specific character, but also still 100% his caustic, blistering real life persona. Quinn gets similar treatment here as either the world's worst father or the world's best father. I can't really decide.
Quinn steals every scene he's in and brings just the right amount of lovable dickishness to keep the movie from ever becoming cloying. The real trick, though, is that this character is responsible for the biggest emotional scene in the movie.
Trainwreck might not be the party movie you gather your friends together and guffaw your way through, but it's a solid flick that serves as one gigantic calling card for Amy Schumer who is poised for a bit of a Hollywood takeover.
Alright, let's keep the review train rolling along! Gonna write as much as I can before jumping on a plane to New Zealand on Monday. Lots of interesting stuff to get covered, so I better get my ass in gear!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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