(Please note: this review was designed to not include specific spoilers, so feel free to read on if you haven’t seen the movie.)
Trainwreck is a funny movie. It is crude too, although, nowhere near as crude as the trailers would have you believe. If you want to watch a funny movie with moments of honesty about our lives and our relationships and how we fuck them up, watch Trainwreck. That being said, there were a handful of problems I had with the film.
One of the problems which comedies that attempt to include dramatic or sad moments run into is the problem of spacing. If you’re going to have scenes intended to induce riotous laughter and others that are supposed to make the audience weep, you need to space these out in a way that works. In certain cases, it is effective to switch from one to the other with little to no warning–particularly for the movies leaning more towards drama than comedy, when they purposely want to catch the audience off-guard for greater emotional impact. They also use these twists sparingly–and if maybe Trainwreck had only done it once, it would be acceptable. But every single scene that was supposed to be dramatic or sad was book-ended by hilarious moments and not to the benefit of the film. In less than a minute you would go from laughing at some crude, sexual joke to supposed to be feeling heartbreak over some event in Amy’s life–and even during these sad scenes the tone would flicker from serious to lighthearted. And this happened again and again and again. I appreciate the movie for attempting to include be both funny and heart-wrenching, but it doesn’t work well.
The other major issue the film has is trying to be too big and do too much–and that’s saying something for a comedy whose run-time is two hours. If you’ve seen the trailers, then you know that Lebron James is acting in this film. Based on how prominent he is in the trailers, you would think that he would play a prominent part in the movie–but most of his scenes are those featured in the trailers. Of course, him being Lebron James, they would play up his part, but it wasn’t only him that felt short-changed. This film tried to include a wide variety of interesting characters and while there was nothing wrong with the characters themselves, many of them did not seem to contribute to to the movie and in a way, some even took a way from it. Here is a list of characters I can come up with off the top of my head: Amy, Aaron, Amy’s father, Amy’s father’s nurse, Amy’s sister, the sister’s husband and son, the ex-boyfriend, Amy’s best friend, her asshole coworkers, her bitchy boss, the young intern, Lebron James, Amar’e Stoudemire, and the homeless man she had befriended–and these are the characters with names, who show up multiple times throughout the movie. Other than Amy, Aaron, and the sister, every single one of these characters felt like their crucial role had occurred in a deleted scene. It felt like the film was flaunting its cast, flaunting the fact that they could come up with so many unique characters without putting the time in to justifying these characters’ roles in the film. It left me constantly waiting for characters to reappear or constantly wondering where X character wandered off to. Considering the fact that the movie was two hours, which is already long for a comedy, they should have made some cuts in the cast and given certain characters more screen time.
Despite these flaws, I still thoroughly enjoyed Trainwreck. It’s not winning any Oscars anytime soon, but not every movie we watch needs to. It stands out among comedies and offers a more individual, a more authentic vision of the world than your standard rom-com.
