For many a millennial, director Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and crew have defined the comic sensibility that has colored our laughter for the better part of adulthood. His brand is equal parts raunchy genitalia riffing and Capra-esque sentiment. It’s a juxtaposition to make any good Protestant bristle, but I’d be a liar if I told you I didn’t enjoy a bit of raunch for raunch’s sake on occasion.
It’s a humor with license to be honest when normal life isn’t or can’t be. It satiates the basest of human hungers while letting its hearers remain relatively guilt-free. It’s at once an all-seeing mirror and an honest, objective eye. For that, I’ll gladly allow those ordained ministers of the vulgar—comedians, that is—to give me the catharsis I need from the oft-brutal and banal societal mores of manner and pleasantness. But when vulgar blends with sweet, I’ve found it’s an experience at once dislocating and awfully true.
Enter Apatow’s latest film, Trainwreck.
The film opens with the gritty, worn, and now near-antiquated aesthetic of a movie shot on 35mm stock. It’s the 1980s. A father tells his two young daughters that he and their mother are divorcing. He half-confesses that she just couldn’t handle him playing with all the many “dolls” on the shelf and being incapable of committing to the “doll” he has. “Monogamy isn’t realistic,” he urges pitifully, a confession/plea/mantra which he has the girls chanting by scene’s end. After his last emphatic, “Again,” the chant isn’t repeated as the film cuts to the modern-day, into a life where the credo has been incarnated in the form of one of those little girls grown up.
The irreverent comedienne-prophet Amy Schumer stars as Amy Townsend. She’s a single Manhattanite with her own awesome apartment, a blossoming career as a writer for the men’s magazine S’Nuff, and a phobia of commitment. The oldest of the two girls, she has taken after dear ol’ dad and become the very embodiment of his skewed ideology. Within the first 15 minutes, a montage of one-night stands shows her foraging through the man-dolls of Manhattan from one sexual encounter to the next. It at once underlines her sexual frivolity and reveals her near-religious cheating on her current “boyfriend,” the hilariously earnest meathead John Cena.
Sex is used neither to glamorize her lifestyle nor to condemn her, but the encounters grant deeper insight into the grammar of her worldview. Amy’s moral economy is revealed through her casual and often hilariously-staged sexual antics. Time is given to craft an intricate interior life for Amy, one which gives psychological credence to her choices. Extended scenes shift from gut-busting hilarity to poignant introspection and sometimes back again.
Trainwreck is deliberately-paced for a mainstream comedy (running over two hours) and yields a surprising patience that better serves Amy and her complexities. And in brilliant defiance of the film’s title, the writing team of Schumer and Apatow eschew The Hangover-style debauchery to render indelibly Amy’s flaws. Small portions of her destructive habits give way, erode even, to more insightful interactions with family, co-workers, and lovers. We are not here to revel in Amy’s wreckage. Sometimes we are just laughing along with her.
Most of her journey takes place in the mechanics of the Hollywood rom-com. Given an assignment to profile up-and-coming sports surgeon Aaron Connors (played by a subdued Bill Hader), Amy finds her relational doctrine tested. This professional relationship soon gives way to what Amy thinks is a one-night stand; she stays the night; and then, he calls her the next day. And eventually, they are dating. Code broken. Dogma upended.
The relationship came as much of a surprise to me as it does to Amy, but it’s that awareness which reveals the film’s most endearing quality. The explicit, rip-roaring comedy on the film’s surface plays as a cover for the tightly-wound emotional core Schumer and Apatow were busy weaving from the film’s first scene. Without having watched Amy’s interactions with her father Gordon (played by one of my favorite comedians, SNL alum Colin Quinn) and sister Kim (the ever-lovely and grounded Brie Larson), the central romance would have played false. The romance makes sense because we know Amy, where she comes from and where she is.
Familial space is a crucial element to the Apatow aesthetic. In Knocked Up, the story of a marriage parallels the main action like an organic testament to the hardships and blessings of long commitment and shifting responsibilities. It’s shown as a place of real trial, where trust is often in flux and currency is equal parts grace and consequence. Funny People (one of my favorite of Apatow’s) reveals that families are not separate from the baggage of any individual. Memories never truly fade, and they can suddenly return to remind of the past.
Apatow’s sense of the family microcosm paired with Schumer’s use of autobiographical elements to flesh out the script reveals a truth to the writing and the performances that moves past mere sentiment. The film slowly reveals the elements of Amy’s life which seem most representative of her self (job, apartment, partying habits, sex-capades, etc.) to be marginal. Her most influential relationships are with her father and sister. Her father is her best friend, yet Amy must break his patterns to be free from his deadening credo (hence the antiquated look of the opening scene). And it is Kim—essentially, the anti-Amy—who provides her the grinding stone of grace and confession. It is to her that Amy confesses her brokenness at the end which leads to a more meaningful romance. Without this familial foundation, the trajectory of her relationship with Aaron and the changes to come in her life bear no weight.
We should consider ourselves lucky that the main purveyors of that sweet raunchiness know how to point us toward the hope of the better, true self and community. I, for one, am glad the modern comedian can serve as prophet of hope. Trainwreck’s vulgar observations and earnest tenderness are disrupting and messy, much like life itself. And I feel free to giggle and blush when Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow whisper their strange and dirty sweet-nothings in my ear, while at the same time show me that, despite its crudeness, life can be undeniably sweet. Laughter reigns alongside the heart, and I’m grinning from ear to ear.
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