‘Trainwreck’ made me cry. As in weep. I’m not talking about my eyes welling up, or having to furtively swipe a single tear off my cheekbone, but full on is-there-snot-leaking-from-my nose CRYING. I’m sitting there in the theater wondering if there was some alternate trailer for this movie cut to “Everybody Hurts” that I missed. And hoping I’m not ruining my eye makeup. [I did.]
Amy Schumer and Bill Hader in ‘Trainwreck’
Trainwreck, WE HAD A DEAL. I go see you opening weekend instead of Ant-Man, you provide me with two hours of an effervescent blend of rom-com sweetness and dick jokes. Nowhere in this negotiation was there any discussion of GENUINE EMOTIONS. I didn’t sign up for this.
Trainwreck made me cry. As in weep. I’m not talking about my eyes welling up, or having to furtively swipe a single tear off my cheekbone, but full on is-there-snot-leaking-from-my nose CRYING. I’m sitting there in the theater wondering if there was some alternate trailer for this movie cut to “Everybody Hurts” that I missed. And hoping I’m not ruining my eye makeup. [I did.]
Things start off promising. I laughed out loud when we saw that Amy had a job writing for a magazine. Job in publishing is the free space in Rom-Com Bingo. That Amy writes for a grody men’s magazine called S’Tuffed signaled to me we were gonna get all the rom-com tropes but subverted in the same way our hard-drinking sexually-capricious heroine deviates from your standard female lead. That doesn’t happen. Hardly any other spaces on Rom-Com bingo get filled. There isn’t even a Meet Cute.
Amy doesn’t like spooning.
Amy and her romantic interest Aaron (Bill Hader) Meet Normal when she interviews him for a story for the magazine. They interact like normal humans who genuinely get along (well, exceptionally funny normal humans). They start dating, and there are some hiccups because Amy isn’t used to Real Relationships, but those hiccups don’t even result in any wacky misunderstandings. When Amy and Aaron get to their necessary third act near-breakup, it looks like a real relationship struggling because of interpersonal differences. Ugh, real life.
Amy and her sister Kim (Brie Larson)
Meanwhile, in Trainwreck‘s most striking departure from the rom-com model, Amy has lots of stuff going on her life aside from dating this dude. Most notably, her complicated relationships with her family. Amy and her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) get along, but Amy has trouble relating to Kim’s stable family life, with a square husband (Mike Birbiglia) and an oddly well-behaved stepchild. There’s further conflict between Amy and Kim as they deal with moving their father, who has multiple sclerosis, into assisted living. [Perhaps you can guess where the weeping kicks in.] The sister relationship in Trainwreck is as real and recognizable as the romance, if not more so. Schumer and Larson really nail the complicated interplay of jealousy and judgment between Amy and Kim.
There are also dick jokes. Trainwreck is very funny. Amy Schumer brings her magic, and the supporting cast is full of delightful oddball characters. I particularly liked a (TAN!) Tilda Swinton as Amy’s sociopathically brash editor and LeBron James as an extremely sensitive and supportive best friend to sports doctor Aaron. [Bill Hader is quite notably the straight man throughout, but he’s Bill Hader so he still gets in some big laughs.]
LeBron James as LeBron James is one of the comedic highlights of ‘Trainwreck’
Somehow, Trainwreck pulls off segueing between the risque comic bits we all came for and its unexpected side of pathos and heartbreak. While Judd Apatow’s confident direction deserves some of the credit, I think the most important factor here is Schumer’s impressive acting chops. She’s charismatic and funny enough that she should be a movie star even if she can’t really act, but she can. I hope this is the first of many Amy Schumer movies.
But next time I see one, I will adjust my expectations and bring along a pack of tissues.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh, where there was a rather chilly reception to the scene where LeBron James talks about how great Cleveland is.
The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be, “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for ten years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
When I was a kid, adults (who had no idea I would grow up to be queer) would talk about how gay men killed themselves once they reached a certain age. The adults acted as if they were talking about some strange species of animal featured on a National Geographic special instead of the people they (whether the adults acknowledged them or not) passed on the street and interacted with every day. The “queers commit suicide” trope was a film staple, one that Vito Russo denounced in The Celluloid Closetand shows up in clips from the documentary of the same name. Now that openly queer people (sometimes) get to write and direct their own films, the trope comes full circle with The Skeleton Twins, directed by out gay man Craig Johnson (who also wrote the script with Mark Heyman), which begins with a gay character (Milo, played by Bill Hader) turning the volume all the way up on Blondie’s “Denis“in his Los Angeles apartmentjust before he gets into the bathtub and slits his wrists (cinematographer Reed Morano does a great job in this scene as well as the rest of the film).
We see Milo’s estranged twin sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), about to swallow a potentially fatal handful of pills when her disconcertingly cheery ringtone interrupts. The hospital is calling to inform her of Milo’s suicide attempt. So, in the manner of middling scripts through the ages, a character, Maggie, is able to take an unspecified time off work (with no notice), book a last minute flight across the country, invite her brother to recuperate at her home in upstate New York, then spring for an extra plane ticket for him. No one, not the hospital, nor later, her mother or husband seem in the least concerned that Milo could try to kill himself again, or that a suicide attempt is a symptom of an illness which should be treated to prevent the person from dying after a fresh, successful attempt.
The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for 10 years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in Cold Comfort Farmwas, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Twins’ Milo and Maggie appear to come from a working-class background. Maggie is a dental hygienist (which requires training but not a four-year college degree) and Milo seems to have skipped college to try to become a “famous actor” in Los Angeles. Later we find out Milo’s childhood bully now works as an electrician. But neither Hader and especially not Wiig act or speak like the working class members of my own family or anyone else’s–though Wiig’s self tan, which makes her look as if she were rubbed with the shavings of a burnt-sienna crayon, makes her resemble some working class folks I know. Luke Wilson, on the other hand, is hilariously natural as Lance, Maggie’s good-natured, good-looking, but not terribly bright, blue-collar husband. When he announces he and Maggie are trying to have kids. Milo says,”I can’t wait to be the creepy gay uncle.”
Lance answers,”You’re hired!”
Another trope that appears in the film is: all the siblings’ problems (even their father’s suicide!) seems to be the fault of their mother (Joanna Gleason in a brief, badly written, poorly conceived role) whom we see having dinner with her children. Again, the mother’s New Age leanings as well as the home she maintains in Sedona plus the ability to jet across the country for a meditation retreat are usually the provenance of the middle class and the wealthy, so the working class status of the family seems tacked-on.
Wiig has some nice moments outside of her comic rapport with Hader (all their best scenes are in the trailer) but she’s miscast. A person with this much to hide would probably present a sunnier facade to the world, the way politicians with draconian platforms cultivate a “friendly” persona. And the script doesn’t do Wiig any favors, calling on her character to smash a fish tank in not one, but two separate scenes to show her state of mind.
Kristen Wiig as Maggie
Hader plays his queeny character convincingly (though perhaps not as skillfully as an out queer actor would), but Milo seems to have had pretty much no life during the 10 years he was estranged from Maggie (the decade seems to correspond with how long the characters have been out of high school–but Wiig is 41 and Hader is 36, which adds to the film’s dissonance). We see in Milo’s apartment at the beginning a tank of goldfish and a photo presumably with an ex and those two items are the sum of the years the twins have been separated. Maggie, has, on the other hand, acquired a steady job, a house, a husband, and a history.
The characters have a way of joking in a “just kidding (but not really)” way that frustrated people use to blow off steam, but the script doesn’t really explore this dynamic. When Milo is reading Marley and Me he asks his sister if she’s read it and she tells him she has and found it “sad.” He asks why and she says, “You don’t know what happens?”
“What? Does the dog die at the end? Look how much I had left,” Milo spits, motioning to a few chapters worth of pages at the end as he tosses the book aside. He later tells her he knew all along that the dog died.
The jokes in the film are good, but there aren’t enough of them to carry the movie. They are disjointed, like skits (though they are better than the skits the two were in when they were both on Saturday Night Live), instead of a language the two siblings use to communicate with one another. We don’t need to know every detail of adult siblings’ background to believe in the characters bond and relationship: You Can Count On Me made Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo’s brother/sister pair seem real, even though we didn’t learn much about their shared past and Linney and Ruffalo, like Wiig and Hader, look nothing alike. The scene in which Maggie confesses to Milo she is cheating on her husband is very much like the (superior) one in which Linney’s character tells Ruffalo’s that she is sleeping with her married boss.
Skeleton piles on the tragedy, so it becomes ridiculous. Not only did their father kill himself, but their mother is an unfeeling bitch! And Milo’s teacher in high school sexually abused him! And both Milo and Maggie have more than one scene in which they try to kill themselves! Any one of these elements would have been enough to build a film around, but put together they become an unwitting joke, like the compounded tragedy (Incest! Dead best friend! Closeted football player boyfriend!) made The Perks of Being a Wallflowerlaughable in spite of some good main performances.
Skeleton Twins is the second film I’ve seen (Mysterious Skin was the first) in which a gay man says the adult man who had sex with him when he was underage is the love of his life. In Mysterious Skin this claim made a little more sense: the audience heard it as evidence of how screwed up Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was. In Twins we don’t get the sense that Milo’s affection for his abuser is anything he should suppress, and Milo’s feelings of love don’t ring true. As I’ve noted before, no matter how “in love” they thought they were, minors who have sex with their teachers usually see, when they grow up, the power imbalance and manipulation in the relationship they were too young to perceive when they were students. Milo has had no such epiphany and for that reason alone–even without the suicide attempt–he should be seeing a therapist.
Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, when she interviewed Tina Fey a few years back, asked about Saturday Night Live‘s checkered history with its women cast members, and Fey countered by saying that a lot of women had great opportunities to showcase their talents on SNL–and not many chances to put that talent to use elsewhere after they left the show. Although former cast member Wiig had a hit with (and co-wrote) Bridesmaids, subsequent films (which she had no hand in writing) like this one seem to have little idea what to do with her. She and Hader were not only on Saturday Night Live together but appeared in minor roles as the couple who ran the amusement park in the underrated (pre-Bridesmaids) Adventureland and I couldn’t help wishing someone had made a film that starred those characters–or another pre-Bridesmaids Wiig character, the one in Drew Barrymore’s Whip It–instead of Milo and Maggie.
