I went along on a date-night to see Trainwreck with the full intention of simply reviewing it for this site. Oh, and having a romantic time, of course. Don’t worry, I shouted a bag of Maltesers and held hands with my wife when she wasn’t busy wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.
As for me? Well, I didn’t hate the movie, but I hated an awful lot about the movie. For such a hotly talked up script, I really expected something with a lot, so was I very disappointed to sit through 120 minutes of every character talking exactly like every other character. Some of what those characters said to the other characters was funny, some of it wasn’t, and then they went someplace else and said more things to each other. That is literally the level of investment and care that this movie was able to bring out in me.
When I started thinking about the troubles with this movie, I started to realise that they were the same troubles I have with most comedies that have come out in recent years. So, bearing in mind the principle rule of “comedy comes in threes”, I present the three biggest problems with Trainwreck, and modern comedy as a whole.
1. Unlikeable and/or unnecessary characters (Amy’s Boss. Everybody at the magazine.)
For no real reason, almost everybody in Trainwreck is an asshole. The magazine that Amy works for is filled with shallow, self-centered dicks (and dickettes) who exist solely to squeeze in some jokes that don’t relate to the story. Amy’s boss is so pointlessly mean that there’s no believability whatsoever that anybody would work for her. Every co-worker (aside from the one mandatory ditzy one who talks like a 12-year-old) is indistinguishable from the next. If you have five characters in a film and they all say the same thing, it’s time to drop at least four of them. Worse still, the point of Trainwreck isn’t to satirise magazine culture, so why show these people to us at all? It doesn’t succeed in fleshing out the main character’s life, and simply comes across as a bunch of empty, pointless jokes.
However it’s not just at work that characters are terrible in this film. Even random strangers are trying to sling zingers to innocent questions on the subway. A good comedy generally needs to have some heart and for at least some characters to be likeable, if not most characters to be likeable. It’s like using performance enhancing drugs in cycling. If everybody is doing it, then it no longer has an edge. It doesn’t help that comedies these days keep nudging to the two hour mark – due to the now obligatory and often misguided “sad moment of reflection” – and two hours is a long time to spend with people you don’t like.
2. Everybody is trying to be funny.
This may seem like an odd criticism – it’s a comedy, of course people are trying to be funny! What I mean, though, is that too many characters are trying to be funny. In the best comedies, the actors are being funny, but the characters are almost never aware of the fact that they are being funny. The script for Trainwreck is filled with one-liners and characters trying to put one another down. Comedies these days are essentially like a 14-year-old who has discovered sarcasm for the first time, and is determined to communicate with nothing else. Aside from making me hate with unparalleled fury, it ruins the grounding of the movie. It starts to feel less like there was a script, and more like six different writers sat in a room throwing lines at a wall, as six different actors clamoured over each other to grab them, and whoever grabbed the most in 30 seconds is how we decide who gets to go on the poster. There’s no teamwork and almost no chemistry. It’s like editing alternating jokes from Stephen Wright and Demetri Martin and calling it conversation. The best comedies set up the characters as the joke, but very rarely as the ones telling the joke. There are people that can do it. Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Seth Rogen are a few examples, but there’s a reason those guys are household names – it’s a very difficult skill to master, and even then, those guys stood as the only ones doing it.
3. No depth.
Typically, a great comedy sets up a desired goal with risks and a potential negative outcome. Dustin Hoffman dresses up as a woman to get an acting gig, but risks losing the acting gig if found out. Robin Williams dresses up as a woman to see his kids, but risks never being allowed to see them again if found out. (Hey, I never said comedy had to be original). The trap comedies fall into today is presenting us with characters that already have a good life, who are trying to get a slightly better life. It’s incredibly low stakes. Picking on Trainwreck again, Amy has a full-time job as a writer for a magazine, she is told she’s up for a promotion in the opening five minutes. Her vice is that she drinks and sleeps with random men, but it doesn’t ever impact her. She doesn’t even start dating Bill Hader’s character out of loneliness, she just finds out that she happens to like him a bit more than the other guys, so you never feel like she’s clinging on to the relationship or needs it to work. Hell, even after things go south and she loses her job (spoilers) she walks straight into a much better one at VANITY FUCKING FAIR! She doesn’t even need to send in a resume. She just walks up to the counter and a few minutes later is being given a cover-story by the editor of one of the biggest magazines in the world. You know why we cared about Dustin Hoffman’s success in Tootsie? Because we saw him fail a bunch of times. Do you know why we really wanted Robin Williams to get back with his family? Because we saw how much it crushed him to lose his kids. Great comedy needs light and shade, but the shade needs to be felt, not just assumed.
As a chick-flick, Trainwreck probably works. A lot of women I know certainly enjoyed it. By extension, it works as a date movie. It works, but will quickly be forgotten.
If you’re a lover of comedy, don’t go. I implore you. Stay at home, have a couch-date instead, pop Ghostbusters into the DVD player, or Planes, Trains & Automobiles, or Midnight Run, or Dumb & Dumber, or Ace Ventura, or Father of the Bride, or American Pie, or Best in Show, or The Naked Gun, or Good Morning Vietnam, or…you get my point.
Written by Mitch Grinter.
Content courtesy of TorrentThisTV
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