Director(s): Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Runtime: 99 minutes
The recent revival of slow-burning, atmospheric horror thrillers has been one of the most welcome trends in years. Having shrugged off the need for grotesque displays (the so called "torture porn" subgenre) indies and studios are catching on to the notion that more blood and gore is rarely needed. The horror genre thrives when it takes time to build towards bursts of violence and terror. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy certainly understands these principles. It builds gradually, teasing the viewer with cryptically creepy details before segueing into the R-rated stuff. Which is why it's a shame that the film is missing something more substantive underneath the polished and menacing aesthetic.
Set in rural Austria, Goodnight Mommy opens on twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) as they play games in a field. The pair lead each other on journeys in and around their home, a puzzling beacon of chilly Euro modernism surrounded by pristine landscapes. Like many kids, Lukas and Elias run to the door when they hear a car approaching. Mommy's home!
But Mommy (Susanne Wuest) is looking a little worse for wear. Having returned from extensive facial surgery, her face is almost entirely covered by bandages. She sleeps most of the day, and demands absolute silence from her two boys. And even when she wakes, Mommy's persona is hardly a warm, nurturing one (even by Austrian standards). She haunts the house while awake, drifting from room to room in loose fitting fabrics that flutter around her bony physique. Elias and Lukas grow suspicious of their mother's frosty new demeanor, and start to monitor her actions as tiny red flags start to go up.
This is the part where I wish I could talk about how Fiala and Franz successfully build up a creepy mystery, but I can't. For all of the things that Goodnight Mommy does right, it is put in danger of losing the audience within the first 10 minutes. A crucial twist (in fact, the twist) is hinted at so early that questions about where the story is headed mostly fly out of the window. One becomes fixated on whether the heavy-handed foreshadowing is a red herring, and if not, then what could be the reason for doing something so obvious? I hoped that Goodnight Mommy would find some way of justifying the inevitable turn of events, but it never does. That's not to say that the film doesn't make sense, but its climactic revelation abandons a rich set up for an obvious finale that loses impact the instant the credits appear.
A good twist should enable the viewer to rethink everything they saw before and, on repeat viewings, pick up on details that they never knew were important to begin with. Goodnight Mommy shoots itself in the foot by providing details that never fully distract from our initial suspicions. Fiala and Franz trap themselves into choosing between two possible answers, and they pick the inferior option. Goodnight Mommy's final act is wince-inducing and quite often chilling, but it's hard to watch without sensing the missed opportunities. When narrative choices lead viewers to ponder what would have been more intellectually satisfying, it gets in the way of appreciating the good things about an artistic endeavor.
So while we're at it, let's mention some of those good things. Despite the one note nature of the script, Fiala and Franz's work as directors is quite satisfying. Working with a team of skilled collaborators behind the camera, the duo do an excellent job of stealthily ratcheting up the tension. Even when the instructions of the page irritate, one can simply luxuriate in Goodnight Mommy's rich visuals, which have a potent mix of icy and sun-dappled imagery.
Performances are also quite striking, which adds another layer of polish to this sophisticated effort. Young children in horror movies are never a sure bet, but the Schwarz twins are very good in their roles. Their picture-perfect Aryan innocence has a blankness that can be used for to suggest the roles of victim or aggressor. Wuest is excellent as well, and plays Mommy as an actual person rather than a domineering monster.
In fact, just about everything in Goodnight Mommy is top notch, which makes the film's nonexistant impact all the more frustrating. Horror movies are rarely treasured for their scripts, but in character-driven work like this, the writing needs to be on the ball. There is something deeply creepy and twisted buried in the framework on Fiala and Franz's film, but it never materializes consistently. Some stunning visuals and a few jarrings scenes aren't enough. This is one of those movies where so much is done right, but ultimately so little about the final product that feels worthy of enthusiasm.
Grade: B-/C+
Director: Alex Ross Perry
Runtime: 90 minutes
There is an art to filming conversations between character, and it's one that is often ignored. Have two people on screen talking? Then just cut between closeups and mid-shots as each person speaks, with the occasional excursion to a wide shot to let you know that both actors actually shared space together on set. Hell, if there's some drama going on behind the scenes, you can just pretend that two actors were actually on screen together (paging The Good Wife).
Yet for director Alex Ross Perry, whose films never contain much in the way of visual flash, the handling of conversations is of the utmost importance. This is just a small, but crucial, part of why his latest film, psychological drama Queen of Earth, succeeds so well. Though there are scenes that employ the well-tread shot-reverse-shot method, Perry also showcases a flair for framing the ordinary in unexpected ways. In one early scene, as tragedy-stricken Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) and successful Virginia (Katherine Waterston) chat, Perry allows the focus to wander. The entire scene takes place in one shot, and shifts from holding on the speaker to the listener. Some of the most important bits of acting take place as performers listen and react to their co-stars, and Perry utilizes this notion to great effect.
There is also the matter of the nature of the conversation(s), and Queen of Earth has a knack for slyly ratcheting up the emotional tension without fully playing its hand. Which is good, seeing as this is the sort of psycho-drama that's heavy on people walking through rooms and talking, and light on external plot developments. Since it's long past due that I actually lay out of the story's foundation, it's this: best friends Catherine and Virginia take a vacation at the latter's (well, her parents') rural lake house after the former's life is turned upside down.
As we learn in the opening scene, a claustrophobic closeup on Moss' tear-stained face, Catherine's father has just died, which has prompted her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) to finally end their relationship (timing isn't his strong suit). Catherine is distraught, for reasons that go beyond the obvious. Virginia, meanwhile, is tasked with being the supporting BFF and emotional caretaker. Despite the placid water by the lake house, the friends' retreat is anything but smooth sailing.
In these two roles, Mr. Perry has created two difficult personalities that are at once off-putting and fascinating. Perry's films have never gone out of their way to make characters likable, and that certainly hasn't changed now. But underneath these thorny exteriors lies the rich psychological substance that drives Queen of Earth from petty squabbling to acid-soaked monologues. If Bergman and Polanski had co-directed the beach house episode of Girls (and/or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), they would have come up with something like Perry's latest.
Most intriguing is how Perry avoids giving out obvious answers. Catherine and Virginia may be friends, but they have funny ways of showing it. They often trade emotional places as well, at times blurring the line between each other (much like Bergman's Persona). That's precisely where the above-mentioned conversation scenes come into play. Closeups are - obviously - used to highlight an actor's face, but in Queen of Earth they also play a big part in erasing the weakening border that exists between the two leads. As we see in flashbacks, Catherine and Virginia were once in each others' shoes, and the smartly composed shots of them together subtly reinforce the idea that their emotional states are sliding up and down along an unsettling spectrum. Even when the women are separated, Perry finds ways of connecting their bodies (or minds), such as when he dissolves from a shot of Virginia jogging to Catherine sluggishly making her way down a staircase.
Whether sharing Perry and cinematographer Sean P. Williams' compositions or not, both leads deliver standout performances as well. Waterston, who only came into the spotlight in last year's Inherent Vice, owns the first half of the film. The caretaker role can become redundant, yet the actress keeps Virginia full of surprises. You expect her to react to a situation one way, given previous examples, and then she does the opposite. Perry also gives the actress quite a bit of room to delve into the character in the thoughtfully-chosen flashbacks, which are informative rather than disruptive. Past and present run together much like Catherine and Virginia, reinforcing the creeping notion that we're all just a few degrees away from either triumph or a meltdown.
With Waterston (mostly) acting as the emotional anchor of the piece, Moss is free to really let loose, and she does so spectacularly. She and Perry take quite a bit of time to wind up Catherine after the opening sob fest, forgoing the urge to fill the role with nothing but melodramatic outbursts. Catherine's unravelling is a slow motion spectacle of mental collapse, doled out in bits and pieces. Moss makes acrobatic leaps from bitterness to anger to tears to unhinged laughter, and lands them all with eerie plausibility. Despite the creepy score that gently pushes the story along, Queen of Earth is sincere in its treatment of mental instability, even though it often has an acerbic way of showing it.
Perceptions of the characters and their actions change at every turn, and to watch the actors, but especially Moss, trace it all on their faces is both elegant and grotesque. Restraint is a powerful tool, and it's impressive how Perry and co. use it even when characters' psyches start fraying at the edges. When Catherine unleashes a torrent of invective on Virginia's smarmy boyfriend (Patrick Fugit), it's all the more frightening because of how quiet she keeps her voice, even though we know that there's a hurricane of bile built up inside. Rather than assault the character (and audience) with an explosion, Perry and Moss opt for a slow poisoning, ensuring that the side effects will linger under your skin and in your head for far longer.
Grade: A-
Director: Craig Zobel
Runtime: 95 minutes
The last thing anyone needs after surviving the apocalypse is to get stuck in a love triangle. Who has time for all of that drama when basic sustenance is a daily question mark? The answer, frustratingly, comes down to the last three people on earth. Two men. One woman. One isolated slice of untouched American Eden. That takes care of the who, but not the why. Director Craig Zobel, working with Nissar Modi to adapt Robert C. O'Brien's novel, answer the first question with flying colors. But when it comes time to dredge up the old love triangle and really make us care, they fall short, thereby stranding a trio of talented actors in a romantic drama that barely elicits more than a hollow, "so what?"
Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) spends her days tending to her family farm, which survived the unexplained death of mankind, and getting supplies from the nearby town in the valley below. Yet while Ann can roam about her family's territory in peace, descending from the ancestral perch requires putting on a makeshift hazmat suit and gas mask. Ann seems content in her isolation, until she encounters John Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a government researcher sealed inside an experimental radiation-proof suit. The initial awkwardness (which here means "guns drawn, voices elevated") passes, and the pair begin to try and build a life together based on trust.
In his opening act, Zobel demonstrates a solid command of the story, the characters, and the overall atmosphere at hand. Gorgeous landscape shots lend an otherworldly aura to Burden Valley, simultaneously emphasizing the location's innocence and its borders with vast expanses of rotten land. There's also a nice visual homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker, though the scene in Zobel's film ultimately comes across as padding.
And speaking of looks, Robbie and Ejiofor don't look so bad themselves, despite just barely limping past humanity's expiration date. The first half hour contains hardly a trace of love or lust, and instead puts its energy toward exploring the fundamental differences of Ann and John's mindsets. Ann is still a devout Christian, determined to be as kind and humble as possible, while John has a rather blunt, mathematically driven point of view. He offers to build a water wheel to help generate power for Ann's home, but has to watch his step once he proposes using the wood from the Burden chapel as material.
Though not without its minor hiccups, Z for Zachariah starts off promisingly, using its post-apocalyptic setting to tell a story about loss and loneliness, rather than just another zombie-filled splatter fest. But then the first awkward arrives and plants the seed of potential romance. The dialogue, not the film's strong suit to begin with, dips in quality. The actors are not tasked with saying anything overwrought, but the words gradually become clumsily arranged. Modi's screenplay has a habit of putting certain developments so close together that there's no time for them to acquire genuine meaning. When certain interactions occur, it feels as if we're watching a painfully condensed version of what was supposed to be a much longer scene.
The arrival of Chris Pine's Caleb does little to help the film, other than adding another attractive face. Ann struggles to adapt to having another guest, and Z for Zachariah fumbles even more in acclimating to a third character. To his credit, Pine makes you wish that Caleb was a more prominent part of the story, investing the role with both mystery and aw-shucks folksiness.
But with the narrative already struggling to find the right balance for the Ann-John dynamic, Caleb's arrival only further upsets the story's foundation. Both sides of the "courtship" that takes place are halfhearted. This wouldn't be a huge issue considering the post-apocalyptic backdrop, but the urgency of the situation never materializes. Ann could choose John, Caleb, or both. But her decision doesn't really carry much weight. Big decisions are certainly made in the film's final act, but the cumulative impact of these choices is as empty as the land beyond Ann's farm. Envy the dead of Z for Zachariah, for at least they never had to experience such aimless frustration.
Grade: C
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Runtime: 111 minutes
It's extremely rare that film franchises get better with age, yet Tom Cruise's 19 year-old Mission: Impossible series continues to see significant improvements. Four years after Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol, Ethan Hunt is back and shows no signs of given into fatigue. Screenwriter-turned-director Christopher McQuarrie has taken control of the fifth Impossible film, and despite some missed opportunities, he's created a stellar spy adventure that keeps Cruise and co. gleefully on track.
Despite the presence of a new director and new screenwriters, the latest installment - subtitled Rogue Nation - has quite a bit in common with its predecessor. Like Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation begins with the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) becoming compromised, albeit under different circumstances. Despite the nuclear disaster averted at the end of Ghost Protocol, the IMF has drawn the ire of Senator Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), who convinces the Senate to disband the cover ops organization. While agents like William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) begrudgingly go with the flow, Hunt goes MIA. He's convinced that there's an organization known as The Syndicate, the sole purpose of which is to instigate acts of terrorism across the globe.
While Hunt and his co-workers have faced various obstacles before, Rogue Nation gets great mileage by introducing the less tangible roadblock of uncertainty. Is The Syndicate real? Is Ethan Hunt going out of his mind after years working for the US government? Some of these questions have easy answers that aren't worth pondering, but their inclusion does highlight an effort on McQuarrie's part to bring something new to this outlandish adventure series.
Yet the biggest and best question mark comes not in the form of an existential dilemma, but a person. Specifically, Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust, whose allegiance seems to change on a whim. The series has made good use of female characters in the past, but none have felt as complete as Ilsa. Frankly, by the end of Rogue Nation, I was ready for an entire movie dedicated solely to her exploits. Obviously no one's out to win awards here, but the actress does make quite an impression as woman who's equal parts Bond girl and Ingrid Bergman.
In fact, despite Ethan Hunt's lone wolf status through the first chunk of the film, the film fares best when it works to incorporate as much of the supporting cast as possible. Cruise can play this role in his sleep and still be convincing, which leaves quite a bit of room for the rest of the cast to really make their mark. Of the returning cast, Pegg is easily the most enjoyable of the lot, playing the frenzied sidekick to Cruise's laser-focused leading man while still remaining grounded. Renner's role has much less to do this time around, but the actor manages to land a few solid quips, especially in his scenes opposite Baldwin.
This being a Mission: Impossible film, however, the real question is: but what about the stunts?? Even though Mr. McQuarrie's experience behind the camera is limited, he and his technical collaborators have done an excellent job of providing Rogue Nation's required spectacle. If anything, McQuarrie overloads the film's first half with excellent set pieces, the crown jewel of which involves an assassination attempt set in the rafters of an opera house. The film's marketing has made a big deal of Cruise actually hanging off of the side of a plane, but by the film's end, that oddly weightless bit of stunt work is a distant memory.
The downside of overloading the film's first half is that McQuarrie compensates by padding the second half. The second hour takes far too long to reshuffle the deck, and McQuarrie's exception handle on the pacing goes too slack for what's supposed to be an high stakes adventure. There are also narrative developments (or rather, lack thereof) that mar Rogue Nation's ambitions. Overall, The Syndicate doesn't feel like much of a major threat (other than as some vague, amorphous "evil" entity). McQuarrie's concept of his villains far outstrips his execution, which struggles to move beyond square one. Ghost Protocol built to a definitive struggle to thwart a specific plot, while Rogue Nation's climax involves trying to get the bad guy because, well, he's probably planning on doing something bad...in the next few months (????).
Second act misgivings aside, McQuarrie deserves a lot of credit for taking the reigns of such a big action movie franchise and making a mostly seamless transition to the director's chair. Despite a few dramatic outbursts between characters, this is breezy, lightweight material that has been expertly assembled. From the opera sequence to a climactic chase that has visual nods to the finale of The Third Man, Rogue Nation is a well-oiled machine that knows how to deliver. McQuarrie knows he isn't reinventing the wheel, but at least he's trying his hardest to make the best damn wheel he can. If the result is a film like Rogue Nation, then he's more than accomplished his goal.
Grade: B
Director: Christian Petzold
Runtime: 98 minutes
Despite seasoned careers, director Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss have precious little name recognition in the US, outside of the festival circuit. That will hopefully change with this weekend's release of Phoenix, the third collaboration between the two. This Vertigo-esque drama, which wowed crowds at last year's Toronto Film Festival, has its flaws - most notably in the pacing - but is still a rewarding slice of German cinema. If nothing else, it deserves attention for Hoss' beautifully understated central performance that reaches its height in a gorgeously executed finale.
Set just after the end of World War II, Phoenix begins with Nelly Lenz (Hoss) on her way to a secluded hospital. Stopped by American soldiers at a checkpoint, Nelly is eventually forced to reveal why she has obscured her face: brutal scars incurred in a concentration camp. Though her eventual surgery does wonders for her injuries, Nelly is understandably shellshocked. She looks quite a bit like her old self, yet shows no joy at the prospect of reuniting with her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). The reason (well, other than the horrific trauma)? She's ambivalent about the idea that dear Johnny may have had a role in her capture by the Nazis.
Yet even though Phoenix's story positions the narrative to function as a psychological mystery, Petzold's screenplay fares best when sticking with the simpler ideas. The introductory act chronicling Nelly's physical recovery is given just the right amount of distance. Petzold avoids sensationalizing Nelly's grief or the gruesome details behind her injuries, in favor of beautiful and solemn imagery capturing the turmoil from afar. These also happen to be the scenes that require the least from Hoss, which is where the film's eventual fumbles arise.
When Nelly reunites with Johnny, he doesn't recognize her, and takes her under his wing at his nightclub (from which the film derives its title). There's an understandable reserve in Hoss' work here that isn't immediately impressive, but builds slowly and surely. Zehrfeld is quite good as well, and avoids making Johnny either overtly sinister or suspiciously saintly. The two actors are a great match for each other, especially given their respective roles.
And that's why it's frustrating that so much of Phoenix's middle comes off as repetitions of a single scene. Nelly is withdrawn and downtrodden, while Johnny is opportunistic and brusque. It's a testament to both actors that Phoenix is always watchable, because at this point Petzold's screenplay starts moving the story forward only centimeters at a time. It's one thing to have variations of a certain scene throughout a screenplay, but here it often feels like Petzold decided to just Copy+Paste a handful of conversations while only changing one or two details.
Even so, it's hard to deny what Petzold pulls off once he gets the pacing back on track. With Johnny's intentions finally out in the open, the film's amorphous middle takes shape. The truth begins to masquerade as lies, and turns this seemingly simple case of mistaken identity into an unsettling web of moral ambiguities. Just when you think Petzold has let his focus slip too far, he pulls it all together just in time before segueing into the conclusion.
Words like "shocking" and "devastating" have been thrown around a lot when discussing the final scene of Phoenix, and not without reason. Yet, in stressing these descriptors, one risks inflating a sequence that is very purposefully executed on a small scale. Phoenix's ending isn't exactly the sort of scene one can "spoil." It's not a revelation that changes one's perception of all that came before. Instead, it's a painful and beautiful moment of honesty, handled with delicacy and precision. Phoenix's middle is certainly a bit flabby, but Petzold's ending is cut as if by an X-acto knife. There are so many questions left unanswered as the credits roll over the film's open-ended emotional devastation. Yet given how hauntingly Petzold, Hoss, and Zehrfeld execute this story, the endpoint makes sense. In the wake of such raw pain, asking for more answers only seems cruel.
Grade: B+
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Runtime: 125 minutes
Coming just one week after Trainwreck, Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw serves as a grim reminder of what happens a formulaic plot meets formulaic execution. Whereas the Apatow-Schumer collaboration created a typical rom-com executed with with humor and heart, Fuqua's work with Sons of Anarchy creator/writer Kurt Sutter is emotionally stunted. You've seen this story of an athlete seeking redemption, and you've seen it done so much better that this latest iteration isn't worth your time.
Not even Jake Gyllenhaal, coming off of a winning streak that peaked with Nightcrawler, can do much to elevate the material. From a physical standpoint, the role is every bit as transformative as the one the actor played in Dan Gilroy's thriller, albeit on the opposite end of the spectrum. Gyllenhaal gain between 20 and 30 pounds of muscle to play boxer Billy Hope. Yet the external transformation is the most impressive aspect of Gyllenhaal's work. Of all of his recent projects, Southpaw gives Gyllenhaal the most traditionally Leading Man role, and the actor sells every minute.
But underneath the muscles and the screaming and cursing, Southpaw's protagonist rings hollow. The blame shouldn't be laid at Gyllenhaal's feet, but rather at Sutter and Fuqua, who have hardly fleshed out the character beyond the most obvious and blunt surface details. With such a textbook protagonist, it's even more difficult to care about the mechanical storytelling. A man is on top of his respective profession, then tragedy sends him into free fall. What is he to do in his hour of woe? Why, revisit his roots, get help from an elderly black mentor (Forest Whitaker), and work his way toward a boxing match that could serve as his redemption. Southpaw is Raging Bull filtered through the aesthetic of 8 Mile, but without the raw intensity of either.
Fuqua has never been a particularly nuanced director, and Mr. Sutter doesn't do much to help. As the architect behind one of TV's most suffocatingly MACHO prestige dramas, Mr. Sutter is an ideal fit on paper. But vapid bluntness multiplied by faux-gritty vapid bluntness only leads to...well, you get the idea. It's not enough to offer audiences a Damaged Male Protagonist and expect a connection, and it hasn't been that way for a while (and as for the way the film uses its female characters...yikes).
All of this reinforces the notion that Southpaw is, from a pop culture standpoint, a bit of an unintentional relic. Even from a technical standpoint, it's a surprisingly flat piece of work. Fuqua's images are a mix of the glossy and the grimy, and both sides are equally artless. The fight scenes effectively communicate the brute force of taking a punch to the face, but they never heighten the story's drama. Every story beat is so obvious that's no room to be engaged in the moment. A story of blood, sweat, and tears shouldn't feel so rote, yet here we are.
Grade: C-
Director: Judd Apatow
Runtime: 125 minutes
Though by no means as sharp as her sketch show, Amy Schumer's leap to the big screen couldn't have come at a better time. Having finished up a third season of her acclaimed Comedy Central series (which featured an award-worthy 12 Angry Men send up), Schumer is one of the most talked about people on the comedy scene. Rightfully so, as her first feature Trainwreck (which she wrote and stars in), proves. Despite the softening around the edges that was perhaps inevitable in the leap to the big studio system, Schumer's voice has landed into the mainstream remarkably intact and genuine.
Billed as a subversion of the romantic comedy, Trainwreck isn't quite the radical comedy promised by the marketing, but that's not entirely a bad thing. Instead of firmly skewering the rom-com, Schumer and director Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) have simply applied the former's voice to a traditional comedy, and made a funny and sweet film in the process.
In fact, the only truly rebellious aspect of Trainwreck's screenplay is that it does a bit of gender-swapping in its main roles. This time, it's a woman takes on the cinematic responsibilities of being highly promiscuous all while harboring an ingrained fear of intimacy and commitment. That woman is Amy Townsend (Schumer, obviously) a Manhattanite working at a GQ-esque men's magazine who's no stranger to boozy one night stands. Amy has followed in the footsteps of her rakish father (Colin Quinn), whose mantra is, "monogamy isn't realistic" (drilled in during the hilarious opening scene). Amy's feelings are challenged, however, when her boss Dianna (a spray-tanned Tilda Swinton) assigns her an article about a surgeon (Bill Hader) who cares for A-list athletes.
To be blunt, the rest of the film doesn't exactly contain surprises. Whether judging by Apatow's other films or by rom-coms in general, there's nothing in the structure of Trainwreck that's designed to surprise. Where the film's success comes from is that it remains (relatively speaking) grounded in reality, offering scenes that are either very funny or quite touching (or both). Though Schumer's comedy often blends vulgarity with cutting commentary, Trainwreck demonstrates that she can create genuine moments of drama as well. With Apatow in the director's chair, the shifts in tone are surprisingly smooth. When Schumer and co. take a minute to really get "serious," the end result feels realistic and sincere, without becoming pretentious. This is not the next great American dramedy, but it is a winning mix of sass and heart often missing from studio comedies.
The second biggest surprise of the film is that, in addition to its sincerity, much of the drama falls on Schumer's shoulders. Backed up by an excellent cast, Schumer does what Jenny Slate did in last year's Obvious Child, and shows off her skills as a comedian and as a convincing dramatic actress. Amy's Amy is, depending on the scene, either the goofball or the straight (wo)man, and she handles both roles effortlessly. Whether making drunken commentary during a movie or tolerating backhanded compliments from Swinton, Schumer is a consistently winning presence whose charm is only magnified on the big screen.
Likewise, the supporting cast is full of effective performances, starting with Hader's love interest. The SNL alum steps up to the plate as a romantic lead, and delivers convincing and heartfelt performance. His rapport with Schumer is delightful, which only makes the weightier scenes register more deeply as well. Brie Larson, playing a role modeled on Schumer's actual sister, does lovely work too. As different as the two actresses look, Larson and Schumer have a believable chemistry as siblings who are bonded by love but separated by their drastically different outlooks on life. Swinton, meanwhile, is a delight in her too-brief role as Dianna, while a whole host of Schumer's comedian friends (Vanessa Bayer, Jon Glaser, etc...) fill out additional roles, each with solid contributions to their scenes. LeBron James (as himself) and John Cena offer riotously funny performances as well, using their limited screen time to maximum effect.
So no, Trainwreck isn't the game changing rom-com that Amy Schumer easily could have concocted. And no, it doesn't have the stinging feminist commentary that Schumer's best sketches possess. But that doesn't stop Trainwreck from working as a highly-enjoyable means of pitching Schumer to the mainstream movie-going public. The studio system has a habit of squeezing the life out of distinctive voices. Thankfully, in Schumer's cast, the voice has remained intact. Under Apatow's guidance (or perhaps protection), Schumer has leapt to the big leagues not by compromising her voice, but by adapting to her surroundings. With this first step now out of the way, the door should be wide open for the comedian to really make her mark. And even if that means getting a few more Trainwrecks along the way, well, that's hardly a bad thing.
Grade: B
